Pouts, Power and Pirouettes

If you want to see up-close what's happening in Russia these days, then pay a visit to the Bolshoi Ballet. You don't have to book a hugely expensive ticket anymore through some gouging state agency. You can make a deal with any tout on Teatralnaya Ploshchad. For not even Russians can kindle much enthusiasm for what was once the artistic pride and joy of the Soviet Union -- any more than can foreign tourists. The tourists may want to take a look at the inside of the auditorium. They may simply want to tell their friends in Dubuque or Manchester that they've been there. But even they must have heard by now that the whole shebang is slowly collapsing into the Neglinnaya River, which runs underneath it, in many more senses than just the literal one.


The fact is that the Bolshoi has become a sad farce. Last year it played the Albert Hall in London -- a rock-concert venue -- with a program of overworked, show-off tidbits. This year, its parade of outdoor performances in British country houses had to be canceled, due to lack of public interest. Even the most manic of Western balletomanes has become irritated, to say the least, with the work of artistic director Yury Grigorovich, which for 30 years has consisted of little but macho athleticism, operatic mass-body effects and push-button emotionalism. The bravura technique, which was the apple of every eye during the Bolshoi's first major foreign tour in 1956 and thereafter, now looks out-of-date, rigid and completely predictable.


It's not, God knows, for want of trying -- on Grigorovich's part, that is. He may not have done original or interesting ballets since what have become known -- with no little irony -- as "the glory days." But there have been reports this year that he's tried to open a Bolshoi Ballet school in Cyprus, and another in London. And he seems to have encouraged his aging prima wife, Natalya Bessmertnova, to tour with any old catch-as-catch-can performers under a variety of titles that associate her with the Bolshoi. Meanwhile, of course, any other dancers who attempt to use the name -- or to leave, or to try to create companies of their own -- have been brutally warned off, or else peremptorily sacked. In February of this year, Gedeminas Taranda, one of the last truly gifted principals in the company, announced his removal in an emotional speech to the audience. Grigorovich, according to reports, shouted "Arrest that man!" to the security guards. The dancers had to prevent them from doing exactly as he ordered.


I could go on and on: Prima ballerina assoluta Maya Plisetskaya, announcing in the 1980s, as she was forced out of the company, "The Bolshoi is a model of this whole country, ... held together by slavery and fear." The Robert de Niro of ballet, Irek Mukhamedov, now working with the Royal in London, saying, "If you do Spartacus all the time (one of Grigorovich's clunky ideological pieces), your legs change shape. I realized that if I was to develop my art, I had to defect."


The dead hand of the Bolshoi's artistic director is everywhere. Where are the new experimental dance companies in Moscow? Where is the feedback between classical and modern that Mikhail Baryshnikov exploited so brilliantly in the United States? The answer is: Nowhere. And the accusing finger has to point at the artistic director, who seems to want to preserve, in aspic or in amber, the dead, triumphalist status quo: overstaffed, overpraised, and over Grigorovich's dead body.


Sanity, in all this, tried to intervene this year, when Yeltsin announced that a contract system at the Bolshoi would replace the present lifelong tenure. This was an attempt to de-Sovietize and democratize the place -- and a (veiled) attack on Grigorovich, who had long regarded the theater as his personal kingdom. There was even a suggestion that a special regency should be appointed to oversee the artistic activities of the king.


From these acts of l?se majest? on, fear and loathing began to stalk the Bolshoi's corridors. Whose side was who on? Change or obsolescence? The last, bathetic act of this tragicomedy took place two weeks ago, when a performance of Giselle was delayed for 20 minutes, as a demonstration of support for Grigorovich by performers panicked about losing their jobs. The audience applauded; it was, in general, sympathetic. But, then, there are many people in Moscow who still regard the rule of Stalin as another "golden age."


There's only one way out of this impasse: Grigorovich has to do the decent thing and resign. For only then does Moscow stand a chance of becoming once more a respected player in the field of dance. At present, it's a shambles.