Back home with Mr. B.

OF ALL THE CELEBRATIONS marking George Balanchine's 100th birthday, none was more resonant than the trip taken in early June by members of his American "community"--ex-dancers, conductors, scholars, and critics (including this one)--back to St. Petersburg, the city of the choreographer's birth.

The occasion was a Russian-American Balanchine Symposium--organized on the American side by Balanchine Foundation director Lourdes Lopez (assisted by dance scholar and DM Senior Advising Editor Lynn Garafola), and on the Russian side by Pavel Gershenzon of the Maryinsky Theatre--and timed to coincide with the theater's six-day orgy of Balanchine ballets. The Maryinsky was not alone in honoring Mr. B: The Hermitage Museum also mounted a Balanchine exhibit with new material from the early Russian years, including rarely seen photos of Balanchine's classmates and fellow dancers. All three events opened together June 2, in the symbolic setting of Catherine the Great's little amphitheater in the Hermitage, with its squat ochre-marble columns, red marble walls, and niches displaying Apollo and the nine muses.

There followed three days of panels, performances, cross-cultural talks, and glimpses of this theatrical city in its eerie all-night summer light. Memorable moments included historian Elizabeth Souritz's confession that she had read one of her old articles about the choreographer and found it ridiculous. Her revelation explained how Russian views of Balanchine had once been almost dictated by the authorities. The impression this senior Russian scholar gave of open-hearted revisionism was echoed in papers from her younger colleagues Oleg Levenkov, Olga Manulkina, Inna Skliarevskaya, Arkady Sokolov-Kaminsky, and Maria Ratanova.

ON DAY TWO, ex-NYC Ballet principal Merrill Ashley gave a master class to Kirov dancers in a big rehearsal room in the Maryinsky. Here, one could again observe the transformation of the imperial style into Balanchine's fast and jazzy American language. After fourteen years of dancing Balanchine, the Russians are no longer neophytes. Still, something about Ashley's clear demonstration of quick weight and accent shifts empowered the brave participants in the class.

On day three, passionate questions arose in Francis Mason's panel on the differences among Balanchine's texts as transmitted by even official stagers from the Balanchine Trust. How can one tell which is the "right" version of a ballet, the Russians wanted to know. Feelings on the issue spilled over the allotted time, so afternoon chair Francia Russell, Pacific Northwest Ballet's co-artistic director, reconfigured her "Dancers' Experience" panel to accommodate diverging views, and played deft referee to all.

For this critic, the evening to remember came on June 4, when the Maryinsky gave the stage to the Perm Ballet, one of two non-Kirov companies invited to the festival. The other troupe, dancers from the Rimsky-Korsakov Music Conservatory, had already performed a reconstructed Dance Symphony, Fedor Lopukhov's 1923 pure-dance experiment to Beethoven, in which the young Mr. B. performed. Later, Perm showed three new Balanchine productions--Donizetti Variations, Concerto Barocco, and La Sonnambula.

Afterwards, Americans and Russians celebrated together in one of the Maryinsky's upper rococo rooms. Ashley and critic Robert Gottlieb made heartfelt speeches. It wasn't just the musical renderings of Barocco and La Sonnambula that prompted the emotion. It was the idea that Mr. B, once banned on the Russian continent, was now reaching right across to the edge of Siberia. In La Sonnzambula, these Perm kids had brought the quintessential Balanchine ritual back to life: A poet gives his heart to a ballerina; she takes him to heaven.