Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg; City Center; New York, New York; April 8-12, 1998.

CITY CENTER APRIL 8-12, 1998

If there's one phrase that sums up Boris Eifman's Red Giselle and Tchaikovsky, it's "over the top." In Russia during the 1980s, his work was regarded as a "symbolic act of freedom," and in a sense both these productions continue this heterodox project, offering once unacceptable views of celebrated Russian figures. But the claim that Tchaikovsky committed suicide to avoid exposure of his homosexuality is hardly new and, in the West at least, much disputed. As for the nonsense that Olga Spessivtseva, one of this century's great Giselles, was driven mad by a homosexual partner who spurned her and a Bolshevik secret police agent who made her dance for the mob, it's hard to know whether to laugh or cry. Eifman is obsessed by sex, especially of the sadomasochistic variety, personified by male demons in black leather; he is also obsessed by sexual triangles, men and women fighting over the same gorgeous hunk. Only in post-Soviet Russia could this combination of moralism, homosexuality, and anticommunism be considered anything but hopelessly old-fashioned.

In the old days, when Russians made ballets about freeing the masses or building the Moscow subways, the dancing was usually first-rate. With Eifman, who has no interest in the expressive resources of any dance idiom, the dancing parallels the void in choreography. The members of his company reveal all the eccentricities of the new generation of Russian dancers--high legs, overcrossed passes, mannered arms, unpolished pointe work. But they also Fall out of turns, have a limited vocabulary of jumps, and go for big effects they cannot bring off.

The best classical choreography in Eifman's work is pastiche--the faux Giselle bits in Red Giselle and the faux Swan Lake bits in Tchaikovsky. But he uses them only For flavor, like seasonings. In the classroom and stage sequences of Red Giselle, for which he actually had to invent something, he used about six steps (lots of pas de bourree), usually performed in unison, and the most rudimentary of spatial patterns. And, lest the argument be made that he is not a classical choreographer, it should be noted that he treats contractions and other modern dance borrowings to suggest inner anguish, repressed anger, and the like, just as simplistically.

But Eifman is lucky. What his dancers lack in skill, they make up in fervor. Their histrionics, straight out of the 1940s, are mitigated by their sincerity and absolute commitment to the material, As Spessivtseva (or the "Ballerina," as she is called in the program), Elena Kuzmina plays the mad scenes with searing pathos and the love scenes with great rushes of passion; she has a gift for the grand gesture, for the sweep of a skirt or the billow of a scarf, for heightening the theatricality of even trivial events. This operatic dimension, which Eifman's other leading lady, Vera Arbuzova, also shares, gives his work an emotional intensity it otherwise lacks.

But neither acting nor spectacular theatrical effects (including the often excellent lighting by Yuri Timofeev) can efface the prevailing tastelessness of Eifman's productions. I strongly doubt that Tchaikovsky fantasized about Birds of Black Thoughts (actually men in black leather) driving a flock of White Swans (women in white tutus) from the stage, or dancing on a table under smoky lights as in Maurice Bejart's Bolero. And I suspect that Eifman doesn't like women much. Poor Spessivtseva, practically roped by her Secret Police Agent in several knock-down-drog-out duets; poor Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky's ever-generous patroness, stalking him like a vampire in perpetual contraction; poor Antonina Milyukova, Tchaikovsky's scorned, flirtatious wife, sullying the conjugal bed with lovers, a "Slave," as the program puts it, "to her vile passions."

Of the two works, Tchaikovsky is the more ambitious. The action moves forward like a film, with quick cuts and a score assembled by Eifman from the composer's works that bridges scenes like movie music. Rather than a single Tchaikovsky, Eifman gives us two--the composer, bearded Albert Galichanin, and his Double, clean-shaven Igor Markov, who bear a striking resemblance to each other. The device allows for a lot of groping, not all of which is unpleasant, since both are charismatic performers. Less interesting is the third male principal, Sergai Zimin, who as the Prince stands in for Odette and as the Joker leads the revels.

I do not believe that sex is vile or necessarily accompanied by violence, that homosexuality is evil and its practitioners necessarily ridden with guilt. Eifman Ballet may be hot stuff back in St. Petersburg, but in New York City, thirty years after Stonewall and nearly forty since the Pill, its sexual obsessions are old hat.