Aplomb

The Winter Performance
Kirov Academy of Ballet
Washington, DC
December 15, 2007

by George Jackson
copyright 2007 by George Jackson

Mishaps can make a performance. One did on this occasion: suddenly an audible scratch came from the loudspeaker system and then there was no sound whatsoever. The music stopped just as an adagio was starting. It was Vainonen’s very Grand Adagio for “The Nutcracker” which goes Petipa’s Rose Adagio one man better: five cavaliers prepare to raise the single ballerina, sparkling in her tutu, as high as the star atop the glistening Christmas tree. Perhaps the 1934 choreography’s intent too was to suggest the ascent of the Soviet star over Russia’s Czarist past and the then current capitalist competition. Whatever significance this passage was supposed to have, the ballerina knew instantly that the impulse to dance shouldn’t be aborted. She shot her line of five danseurs a commanding glance and without pause was lifted, no, soared into the air with her back proudly arched, one leg firmly bent beneath as hold for her partners’ hands and the other extended behind like a comet’s tail.

These were not seasoned professionals dancing but students. When the ballerina touched ground again and the audio hadn’t yet resumed, the academy’s artistic director, Oleg Vinogradov, called out counts and some of the audience began to hum along so that the ballet could continue. Eventually there was full music again, the true Tchaikovsky, and the total 32 member cast of this “Nutcracker Suite” danced an exhilarating conclusion.

The technical glitch (a blown amp) was unusual. The academy’s productions are in capable hands (those of Ralph Hoffmann, Aaron Carmichael and crew). Not exceptional was the high standard of dancing. The ballerina – 16 year-old Mallory Clark – and her five danseurs - soloist Min-Woo Kang, Gideon Butler, Musashi Alvarez, Gabriel Davidsson and Andrew Pontius – were, from the start, elegantly placed. There was little telltale of strain, no spoor of anatomic fragmentation in the lifting maneuvers but an almost seamless dynamic. Delicacy and strength, imprints of the Russian school, were apparent. Solo passages of step combinations aimed for clarity suffused with a spontaneity belying the classroom care essential for engendering it. Clark, on her own, turned multiple pirouettes as evenly and smoothly as if spinning silk. Some of Kang’s leaps and landings seemed wind buoyed. Even the youngest and smallest on stage – such as Michael Pontius, Meiri Maeda and Reagan Wise in the Porcelain Figurine pas de trios – had the fundaments of this school’s training.

The evening’s performance was in honor of Mme. Yelena Shatrova Vinogradova, deputy artistic director of the academy from its founding in 1990 to her retirement last summer. Because of the director’s peripatetic career, it was Madame who often implemented his concepts and provided the continuity and stability so essential in a training and residential school for young people. She could be both formidable and sympathetic when acting as chief. Her personal taste is conservative and perhaps a trifle sentimental, yet intellectually she acknowledges the need to progress and expand – except when it comes to the Russian school of classical ballet. There she has been adamant that any change must come from within the tradition itself. Sometimes she has been known to weep after witnessing how professional companies altered her graduates. For 17 years, though, she insisted on the school turning them out pure, and they proved to be most marketable.

Mme. Vinogradova had presided in the front row at almost all of the Kirov Academy’s winter and spring performances. This time, ill health prevented her from attending, but she would have been proud of her “dancers”. It was a long program with 43 numbers. Like its many predecessors in the series, it gave an invited audience examples of Russian ballet training hard to match outside Russia. Apart from the aplomb of “Nutcracker Suite” there were other highpoints. Individuality showed in the many classical variations, among them: India Rose’s sculpted temperament and Nana Yamatani’s technical stamina (in “Le Corsaire” solos), Elitsa Zafirova’s imperial pride (in a passage from “Paquita”), Patricia Zhou’s calm security (in a “Sleeping Beauty” solo), and young Ainsley Sorenson’s fresh attack (in a “Le Halte de Cavalerie” excerpt).  Natalie Varnum and Stefan Drach’s classic simplicity in the “Giselle” Act 2 duo made it most moving. Rebecca Houseknecht’s fleet footwork was featured in the “Flames of Paris” pas de deux she shared with Simon Wexler. Carina Brown, paired with Ji-Seok Ha, conveyed the Danish itch to dance of Bournonville’s “Flower Festival”. Less successful have been the Kirov Academy’s forays into other than balletic genres. At these recitals, modern dance has never been represented by its classics. Most of this year’s selections were semiballetic character or mood numbers. All were cleanly executed but only Ashley Canterna’s “Mein Herr” had the true flavor of a different species – show biz – as delivered by Houseknecht. Also on the program were a couple of group ballets, Mme. Vinogradova’s “Little Sylphides” (to music by Rhein) and Adrienne Dellas’s “Le Patineurs” (to the familiar Meyerbeer score), for the school’s youngest pupils who looked alert and not overly cute.   

Prior to the dancing, Oleg Vinogradov had spoken about Madame. He then introduced her successor in the role of deputy artistic director, Marat Daukayev (also formerly of the Kirov Ballet in St. Petersburg where he was a star performer and then teacher). The academy’s staff teachers - Ludmila Markovina, Jacqueline Achmedow, Lyubov Fominich, Angelina Armeiskaya, Anatoli Kucheruk and Vladimir Djouloukhadze – were credited in the printed program for the numbers they had coached.

Photo, by Paulo Galli:  Mallory Clark and Min-Woo Kang, and dancers of the Kirov Academy of Ballet, in "Nutcracker Suite."