Attitudes.

Half a century ago this month an event of seismic proportions hit the dance world. It was the first visit to the West of Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet. And it was quite a night--October 3, 1956, at London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, with the Leonid Lavrovsky/Sergei Radlov/Serge Prokofiev production of Romeo and Juliet featuring Galina Ulanova, Yuri Zhdanov, and Sergei Koren in the ballet's original 1946 Bolshoi staging, itself only slightly revised from the first 1940 Soviet production by Leningrad's Kirov Ballet. Three years later the American impresario Sol Hurok brought the Bolshoi, with the same first program and much the same cast, to New York's Metropolitan Opera House.

On both occasions, this was a big deal. Ulanova with her Juliet, already seen on film, together with the Bolshoi and Soviet ballet, were legendary in Western dance circles. In 1956 this was virtually the first ballet company to come out of Russia since the Diaghilev Ballets Russes before World War I.

I say virtually for in June of that same year Moscow's Stanislavsky and Nemicovich-Danchenko Ballet, under the direction of Vladimir Bourmeister, had caused a stir in Paris. Individual Soviet dancers had been seen in Paris and New York even before World War II. During the 1950s, concerts of Soviet artists--singers and folk performers along with ballet dancers--had come to the West, being freely used as Soviet propaganda.

In those politically charged circumstances such star dancers as Alia Shelest, Raissa Struchkova, and Gyorgy Farmanyants had performed in London, and there had even been a brief sighting of the magical Ulanova herself in Florence, Italy. Three years earlier a large Russian troupe, with stars from both Moscow and Leningrad, had arrived in Paris but were pulled back on political grounds before they even opened!

But all these tantalizing glimpses merely whetted the appetite, and when the Bolshoi Ballet booking was finally announced, the lines snaking around the Opera House started three days before the box office opened. By the third night about a thousand people were sleeping in the streets. I know--I was there all three nights on Covent Garden's hard cobblestones.

The initial impact of Soviet ballet in the West--the Kirov Ballet of Leningrad (aka St. Petersburg) followed the Bolshoi in 1961 with seasons in Paris, London, and New York-was remarkable. Everyone noted the commitment of the Russians: their stylistic homogeneity and their command, their emphasis on dramatic content, in the manner of Michel Fokine rather than the neoclassicism of Balanchine and Ashton. The sheer glamour of their Russianness struck a chord with audiences as much as the whole-heartedness of their approach impressed the dance community. This first impression was later emphasized when the Russian defectors--notably Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, and Mikhail Baryshnikov--came to work in the West, making their own bridges to Western ballet culture.

Fifty years ago I had little idea of where this cross-fertilization might lead. Political considerations were then of major significance, with dance companies used as economic and political pawns in the East-West chess game of the Cold War. On November 15, 1956, the Sadler's Wells Ballet (now The Royal Ballet) was meant to open in Moscow, but the Hungarian student uprising intervened and the visit was abruptly cancelled. Eventually Western ballet companies--first the Paris Opera Ballet--penetrated the Russian fortress. On that same political front the cold war finally started to thaw--with ballet in the forefront of the defrost--and finally the Soviet regime itself imploded, leading to a new relationship between Russian dance and the West.

In 1956, while reviewing the Stanislavsky season in Paris, I wrote, "Yet although we in England ... have much to learn from the Russians, they in different ways quite possibly have just as much to learn from us." It was, I think, an oddly prescient comment. The odder thing is that the Russians may have taken more from the West than the West took from the Russians. Our classical ballet system still lacks the style and comprehensive training methodology of the Russians, and our companies still tend to miss the total commitment and immersion evident with the Bolshoi and Kirov, even though both of these troupes happen today to be at less than their best.

Yet the Russians? They have embraced Balanchine. The Kirov can appear at both Covent Garden and Washington's Kennedy Center with an entire program by William Forsythe (see "Reviews and Previews," Sept.). The major choreographic hit in the past New York ballet season was Russian Seasons for New York City Ballet by Alexei Ratmansky, a Westernized graduate of the Bolshoi School who is now artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet and who returned last August with his company for yet another Covent Garden visit. The London repertoire included Pierre Lacotte's dubious reworking, seen in New York last year, of Petipa's 1862 The Pharaoh's Daughter. So who--50 years later--has learned more from whom?

Senior Consulting Editor Clive Barnes also covers dance and theater for the New York Post.