La Bayadere.

Rudolf Nureyev waited thirty years after coming to the West to stage La Bayadere, and he almost waited too long. The Paris Opera Ballet gave its first performance of the new production on October 8, 1992; less than three months later Nureyev was dead.

When he first suggested staging it for the Royal Ballet in 1963, the Royal's director, Ninette de Valois, declined. She did allow him to do the "Kingdom of the Shades" scene, which bacame one of the jewels in his partnership with Margot Fonteyn). He restaged many other ballets in the interim (including the Petipa Raymonda, never before done in the West), but he was not, after all, first with La Bayadere. Nataliya Makarova, another product of the Kirov Ballet, weighed in with her own version for American Ballet Theatre in 1980.

The works created by Marius Petipa and his colleagues for the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg a hundred years ago tend toward either the supernatural (nutcrackers coming to life; girls turned into swans by an evil magician; a princess and her whole court put into a deep sleep until a prince should wake them) or the exotic (Byronic corsaires in the Mediterranean; a French count returning from the Crusades with tales of battling the Saracens). La Bayadere falls into the latter category, with its warriors, priests, and temple dancers in pre-British India.

The story is something of a cross between Aida and "The Lady or the Tiger." Solor, a warrior, loves and is loved by Nikiya, a temple dancer (bayadere). However, the chief priest at the temple also loves, or at least wants, Nikiya; and the Rajah intends Solor to marry his daughter, the Princess Gamzatti. Although Solor has pledged himself to Nikiya (with the same gesture with which Siegfried pledges himself to Odette in Swan Lake) and is shocked by the proposed marriage, he doesn't reject it out of hand; the question whether he would have defied the prince and held to his pledge is mooted when the Rajah arranges to have Nikiya killed.

In the next act, Solor, brooding over Nikiya's death and his own future, smokes an opium pipe (this is India, after all), and the scene dissolves into his dream of the Kingdom of the Shades, in which he is temporarily reunited with Nikiya.

In Nureyev's version, the ballet ends there, as it did at the Kirov in his day; Miss Makarova recreated the final scene, in which Solor, Gamzatti, the Rajah, and Nikiya's shade dance together, and then, Solor having chosen to go through with the wedding, the wrathful gods destroy the temple and the company assembled in it.

There is something to be said for each version--restoring the last act resolves the dramatic conflict; omitting it ends on the stronger choreographic note. More of that in a minute, but first the Paris Opera Ballet's performance of it, which East Coast audiences had a chance to see during the company's brief visit to the Kennedy Center last month. In the cast I saw, Isabelle Guerin was a splendid Nikiya. Like Odette in Swan Lake, the role combines classical footwork with sinuous movements of the upper body--in this case, positions of the head and arms based on Indian art. Miss Guerin blends the two superbly, and her dance at the betrothal party should soften the hardest-hearted Rajah.

She has a worthy Solor in Laurent Hilaire, an imperious warrior and an ardent, even if not totally faithful, lover. But the dancer is trustworthy even if the character is not, a matter of some importance in a ballet that starts with Nikiya running across the stage and hurling herself into the air headfirst toward Solor, who catches her at waist height; and that goes on to various overhead lifts. Hilaire doesn't have the panache of the young Nureyev in, for example, the coupes jetes en tournant; but his turns and leaps are clean and exciting.

Gamzatti is a far less grateful role than Nikiya, but Elisabeth Platel handled beautifully both jealous rage and a difficult turn (sort of an inside-out fouette, which Anna Kisselgoff in the New York Times glosses as an attitude enveloppee en dedans).

Finally, there is the corps de ballet. While the corps has a lot to do in any Petipa ballet, the Kingdom of the Shades gives it special standing here. This scene begins with a girl coming out of the wings onto a ramp at the rear of the stage and raising her left leg high in an arabesque, which she holds for several beats. She then walks forward four steps as another girl steps onto the ramp behind her; they both perform the same sequence, are followed by a third girl, and so on, until 24 (or, in the opulent czarist original, 32) girls have come out of the wings, proceeded down the ramp, and wound around the stage. If this is done sloppily--with the girls starting and finishing the arabesques as if they were taking instruction not from the ballet master but from Henry David Thoreau, telling each to follow a different drummer; or if the ones who have been on stage the longest start to wobble by the time everyone is assembled--the scene becomes really quite tedious. If it is done as well as it was by the Paris (which, come to think of it, was known for its ballet school even during the days--before Nureyev took over its direction in 1983--when the company had fallen into ill repute), the beauty builds and builds.

But what about the decision to end with this scene? I can't help wondering what solution Nureyev might have found had this project not been postponed until he was weakened by illness, since making the dramatic and the technical aspects of a work reinforce each other was always his forte.

What he typically did in his restaging was to bring these nineteenth-century ballets, not into the twentieth century, but in tune with the literary sensibility of the nineteenth century. When these ballets were first created, dramatic unity was less important than giving everyone in the company something to do (hence the innumerable "national dances," such as the mazurka, czardas, and Neapolitan dance in Swan Lake; the variations for the fairies in The Sleeping Beauty; and the dances for the "Negro children," the Golden Idol, and the girl with the water jar in La Bayadere), and providing an opportunity for upper-crust St. Petersburgers to make assignations with the girls in the corps or (in the case of very upper-crusters) with the ballerinas (the rising star Mathilde Kschessinska, later a noted Nikiya, was the mistress of the young Nikolai Romanov, later Czar Nicholas II). Dramatic continuity was often left to fend for itself.

Furthermore, the leading male dancers were divided into danseurs nobles and danseurs caracteres, a distinction that persisted long after the imperial court had closed up shop and the ballet company had been renamed the Kirov, after the man whose assassination gave Stalin his excuse to begin the Purges. The danseur noble partnered the ballerina; the donseur caractere did the glittery stuff. Actually, even the partnering was sometimes shared: in Act II of Swan Lake, for example, the Prince's friend Benno shared in the scene with Odette--rather as if Romeo gave Benvolio half his lines in the balcony scene.

Nureyev was scarcely the first to alter some of these arrangements, but he was, having burst on the Western scene so dramatically, the most widely noticed. When he was criticized once as selfishly aggrandizing his role, he replied, "A pas de deux is a conversation of love. How can you have a conversation if one partner is dumb?" Thus in La Bayadere, both in the scene at court and in the Kingdom of the Shades, Solor has as big a solo as Nikiya--just as in Swan Lake Nureyev added the brooding solo between the scene where Siegfried's mother tells him he must choose a bride and his first encounter with Odette; and he added a can-you-top-this? element to the Black Swan pas de deux.

Unchivalrous, those of the Anton Dolin school would say. One might counter: No, merely giving the princess a prince worth having.