Ballet, the Kirov, and the Soviet Ballet Canon

How does the Western dance world reincorporate Soviet ballet, and vice versa? Jennifer Homans tackles the Soviet side of the tricky question, because of its urgency. So many of the best ballet dancers and choreographers alive worked under the Soviet system. St. Petersburg's Kirov Company, under director Makhar Vaziev, in particular, must decide how to proceed:

Should the company close the door on its Soviet past, re-open Peter the Great's "window on the West," and rush to "catch up" with Europe and America? Or is there something of value worth preserving from the ballet of Soviet times?

...In response to the upheavals of 1905, World War I, and the Russian Revolution, many of the dancers and choreographers trained under Petipa and his successors fled the country, taking their skills and knowledge to Europe and America. (They included Fokine, Nijinsky and his sister Bronislava, the impresario Diaghilev, and perhaps most importantly, Georgi Balanchivadze, or George Balanchine.) Those who remained in Russia were swept into heated debates about what constituted "socialist" forms of dance. Classical ballet was a natural target: at first Lenin saw it as a corrupt "landowners" art, but finally he conceded that it was the rightful heritage of the proletariat, and the former Maryinsky Theater became the self-appointed guardian of Petipa's legacy. Indeed, the company has often been seen as a haven that protected imperial classicism from the artistic degradations of Bolshevism.

It is not possible, or even desirable, to ignore the accomplishments of Soviet ballet, but the impulse to do so is strong:

In short, the Kirov is trying to give itself a new history--the history it might have had but for 1917. Vaziev and many of his ballet masters belong to the Yeltsin generation, and their disdain for the Soviet era is palpable, and understandable. They are too young to have seen original productions of Soviet works of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, but they came of age when the Kirov was languishing and communism was crumbling.

...But this dismissal of Soviet aesthetics raises a serious problem. Ballet has no universally accepted standardized notation, and so the "text" of a dance exists in the minds and the bodies of those who perform it. ...The "classical tradition" is thus little more than a fragile chain of memories passed down from one generation to the next. Vaziev and his team are breaking the chain and removing many of the Soviet links, yet they depend on teachers and coaches whose careers were made in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. And these Soviet veterans feel that it is the accomplishments of their era that are being lost and betrayed, with dire consequences for the future of Russian ballet.

...Many Kirov coaches complain that today's Russian dancers, by contrast, slavishly imitate the "mannerisms" of Western artists. And in their judgment the new "authentic" reconstructions of Petipa's classics that Vaziev has commissioned are "primitive," old-fashioned, and anachronistic. The problem, one senior coach confided, is that the new ballet masters hired by Vaziev are mere "children," "provincials who know nothing" and want to "explode" the Soviet heritage. This impulse, she argues, shows a depressing lack of historical reflection: "We have to keep those things which were achieved. It is like our great revolution of October 1917, in which we destroyed everything. We have to learn not to repeat this mistake."

Jennifer Homans observes:

There are many problems, but the company is striking out in bold directions, and it has a deep tradition to draw from. The danger lies in the desire to retreat into ersatz imperial grandeur, and the impulse to elevate cynicism about the Soviet past into an artistic creed. This would be unfortunate, for ballet is an idealistic art form, and one that depends--perhaps more than any other--on how its artists treat their history.

Evolution, not revolution, is the best approach. Reinterpret the Soviet dances, as the older Imperial dances have been reinterpreted in both East and West, but above all, keep dancing them. Work out a rapprochement with Western ballet. In a half-century or so, the two traditions will fuse into a workable new tradition. Remember, these "provincial" children aren't so bad either, and their instincts may be sound. Ballet is a living tradition: if you lose the children, you lose everything. Everything!