Men of the Maryinsky.

The Maryinsky Ballet--touring under its former name, Kirov--promises a stellar male ensemble for its June 28-July 10 visit to Lincoln Center; but company politics may keep some of them at home.

Classicism, like everything else, evolves," said Diaghilev. "It is a means to an end," he added, confident that he himself knew what that end would be. For him, it was a coherent artistic vision, regardless of its shock value. If we look back at the end of this century, however, we can now see that evolution in classical ballet has been especially significant for male dancers--top billing with the ballerinas, spectacular leaps forward in technique. We might ask to what end they have been jumping higher and turning faster.

The Maryinsky (or, as it was known in the Soviet era, Kirov) Theatre was the proving ground--and often killing field---of so many Russian male dancers. There we find the men who have most contributed to the art and development of male dancing--and we immediately face a contradiction. In some of the most famous examples, their fame and influence has been defined more by their absence from, than their presence in, the theater. Vaslav Nijinsky must surely be at the top of the list, but by his own admission he "danced only four times a year," was never a principal dancer, and in four seasons with the Imperial Russian Ballet he danced only one major role (Albrecht, in the infamous 1911 Giselle, when his costume created a scandal). His career in Russia was over by the time he was twenty-two, and his revival of the fortunes and reputation of the male dancer was made not in St Petersburg but Paris.

Some twenty years later, the brief visit of Vakhtang Chabukiani to the U.S. in 1934 does not seem to have widened the appeal of ballet; newspaper reviews of the time note his extraordinary technique but nothing more in their comments on his dancing with Tatyana Vecheslova at Carnegie Hall in the pas de deux from Le Corsaire, The Flames of Paris, and The Little Humpbacked Horse.

It was Rudolf Nureyev's 1961 "leap to freedom" in Paris that provided the second impetus to men in ballet, but again, his influence was felt most in the West, not in Leningrad. The acknowledgment of his star appeal during his three seasons at the Kirov was always tempered with criticism of his imperfect technique that continues to this day. Although Nureyev's importance is more widely understood in Russia and his picture now hangs in a rehearsal room at the Vaganova Ballet Academy, it is his contemporary Yuri Soloviev, whose career was spent exclusively with the Kirov, whom many Russian balletomanes would rank the better dancer.

Mikhail Baryshnikov's career at the Kirov was a relatively long one --seven seasons. He was the best Basil of his generation and danced a memorable Albrecht; yet despite the brilliance of his technique and the intensity of his acting, he was not thought to have the right look for a Prince Desire (he danced the role only a few times) and was never given the role of Siegfried in Swan Lake but danced only the pas de trois.

Nijinsky, Nureyev, Baryshnikov --these are perhaps the only three dancers whom the general public would expect to be on any list of leading Kirov-Maryinsky males [see page 64]. The more knowledgeable, however, would include the choreographers Fyodor Lopukhov and Yuri Grigorovich (the Maryinsky has been short on choreographers this century) and the influential teachers Vladimir Ponomarev and Alexander Pushkin (mentor of Nureyev and Baryshnikov). Michel Fokine, one of Nijinsky's teachers, was a dancer, but he gained fame as Diaghilev's first choreographer; an early exponent of a more naturalistic style, Fokine seems to have spent most of his time as a principal on the stage of the Maryinsky, asking himself, What is the meaning of all this? I would not hesitate to call George Balanchine a man of the Maryinsky, but he was a dancer of small character and demi-classical roles; his early influence as a choreographer was felt outside the official theaters.

The first names on our list represent a crossover of disciplines. Pavel Gerdt, creator of leading roles in The Sleeping Beauty, the 1895 Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and Raymonda, and for nearly fifty years, until 1916, the undisputed prince of Russian Ballet, was an equally important teacher of the emerging St. Petersburg style. His successors to the Maryinsky tradition, the Legat brothers, Nikolai and Sergei--perhaps the first products of the Russian style, with its assimilation of Italian bravura and a soft French line --were also important teachers.

Valery Panov was always an outsider at the Kirov (despite the fact that Vaganova herself accepted him into the school). He says, "I not only lacked a Kirov physique and polish, but in some ways I represented their opposite. I was emotional, the Kirov, coolly controlled. I believed art came from an inner vision; the Kirov sought it in the achievements of past generations' masters." His unorthodox jumps--called pas-nov--created a new standard, yet today the very mention of his name at the Maryinsky can still cause an argument. Nikita Dolgushin danced for less than two seasons at the Kirov before backstage politics forced him out of the theater. One would think that the glittering international career of Andris Liepa would guarantee him an uncontroversial place in the ranking, but at the Maryinsky, where for some three seasons he danced much of the classical repertory, you will hear his style was "too Bolshoi." As for his sometime pupil, Serge Pakharev, the new "bad boy of ballet," his actual career at the Maryinsky has to date been all but nonexistent. This, then, is a revisionist ranking of dancers whose talent and total commitment to their art is the only requisite for inclusion.

Their very inclusion, however, precludes any generalizations about them, for each of them had (or still has) his own particular style and technique. What they do have in common is a shared fidelity to a continuity of tradition which can be called the Maryinsky (Kirov) style: an elegant line, legato, epaulement, port de bras--the hallmarks of the St Petersburg (Leningrad) School which (except for Liepa) every one of them attended. At the same time many of them break this genetic code; the steps of discontinuity--Chabukiani's cabrioles performed at a very unacademic 60 degrees; Nureyev standing on demi-pointe; Farukh Ruzimatov's high arabesque, which caused outrage at the time--have not only given them their individuality but have since become the norm.

The Maryinsky has often been likened to the shrine of classical ballet, but for many of these men "mausoleum" has been a more accurate metaphor to describe the artistic frustrations felt throughout the century: Fokine's reaction against the "pursuit of applause," Nureyev's refusals to stay onstage for the mime scenes ("traffic directions," he called them), Baryshnikov's battles to stage contemporary works. Except for a brief period immediately after the 1917 revolution, the theater has been reluctant to change, a reluctance which only magnified the explosion when it did occur, when the drama off-stage was more compelling than that onstage. Yet, despite Russia's political upheavals, politics no longer defines these men, for the catalogue of resignations, suicides, expulsions, and defections which the politics of the day sometimes engendered (and for some, made them famous) is today not as important as their influence on ballet itself. Chabukiani's literally binding himself with ropes as the slave Ali in Le Corsaire is an anachronism; his new "acrobatic" technique which went with it--rivoltade, with jetes and multiple pirouettes--survives. Baryshnikov's symbolic role of anti-hero in an oppressive USSR is no longer valid in a democratic Russia; what survives is this century's most perfect technique.

Some of the changes which have occurred during the century are captured in photographs of earlier productions; for the role of Solor in La Bayadere, Gerdt in 1900 wore heavy silks, a full turban, and outrageous high heels [see page 57], while Ruzimatov in the 1990s wore light, almost see-through silk, with much of the body exposed. Even if we knew nothing about ballet, we could see that Gerdt's costume would permit him to do little more than make elegant poses, whereas Ruzimatov's costume was designed for full movement of the body. Such changes in costume chart not only the increasingly athletic technique of the male dancer, but also the improvement in status, from that of a subservient porteur to a more-than-equal partner with the ballerina. As he was given more to do onstage, the male dancer steadily became more noticeable.

There is something else we notice; there is nothing sexual about Gerdt but Ruzimatov exudes sexuality. Nijinsky started the slow burn in 1911, taking off the overtrunks in Giselle, a scandal which caused his dismissal from the Imperial Russian theaters. When Nureyev in 1960 shortened his jackets and wore sheer tights he argued correctly that it improved the line of his body; of course it also made much more prominent his undeclared role as sex symbol, a role he played to the hilt in the West. Today, the dancer is sex; what was merely hinted at by Nijinsky in the costume for Le Spectre de la Rose in 1911 is now overt in the costume worn in 1999 by Pakharev, whose interpretation eschews the guarded, often self-conscious ambiguity of his predecessors. If the role is the antithesis of the cold classical style, it is still a pure example of the St. Petersburg romantic tradition, danced best by men with an exotic appeal, Ruzimatov for example. Pakharev is more provocative, a spiked rose.

If the body has become all-important, it is ironic that a theater which continues to categorize dancers into types--danseur noble, demi-caractere, comique--should have produced so many men who refused to be pigeonholed. Nijinsky, Soloviev, Baryshnikov, Samodurov, Andrei Batalov--each of them with the "wrong" height or with less-than-perfect proportions and having to fight (and in the case of Batalov, still fighting) for the big roles reserved for the perfect body types. The true danseur noble, however, has been a rarity--Gerdt, Konstantin Sergeyev, Dolgushin, Konstantin Zaklinsky, Liepa, Evgenyi Ivanchenko--and his elegant persona has often been less popular with an audience than the mercurial pretenders. Soloviev's stocky build and musculature was softened with a fluency and clarity of line that allowed him both to show off his bravura technique as the Bluebird, and to gracefully retire this technique in his interpretation of the role of Albrecht (he was otherwise not a natural prince, lacking an effective dramatic presence).

In a recent interview Batalov was asked why he thought he had not so far been given the role of Albrecht. At the Maryinsky, he replied, you are classified either as a competition dancer or a theater dancer, and that he is classed as one of the former. His reply brings us to the very crux of male dancing in this century: the difference between technique and interpretation. How can it be that Batalov, who has won a clutch of gold medals, has not been given the romantic roles? He is exciting to watch, and is superb in Don Quixote, but his blazing corkscrew pirouettes perhaps come dangerously close to technique for the sake of technique.

When we talk about Nijinsky and his legendary technique, it seems less important to know how many entrechats he could perform, or even whether or not today's dancers can do as well or better (and certainly they can); what matters is that his technique seems to have been subsumed within his own distinctive personal interpretation of a role. At the end of the century, harmonizing a modern technique within an old ballet is a rarity; one example: to stand in the wings of the Maryinsky watching Ruzimatov in La Bayadere slowly raise his leg ever higher in arabesque, way beyond the strict classical school, is to see close up a combination of extreme physical exertion and a yet relaxed romantic elegance that seems to epitomize the character of Solor; the technique is embedded in--not separate from--the role.

Diaghilev said, "Classical ballet begins where technique ends." If we look at the major roles at the Maryinsky and see how they have changed throughout the century, we should not unduly emphasize the obvious fact that the male dancer now has more to dance, but how he dances. In the Swan Lake of 1895, the danseur noble, Gerdt, danced only the pas de deux, and another dancer took the miming role. The virile romantic Siegfried that we see today is from Sergeyev, who enlarged the choreography to suit; he created a new variation in Act I, and the familiar assembles and grands jet, s in the Black Swan Pas de Deux. At the premiere of The Sleeping Beauty in 1890, Prince Desire had only one variation, in Act III, but according to Tchaikovsky's brother Modeste, the audience found its high jumps unsuitable to a royal prince--a far remove from the long-limbed leaps of Ivanchenko's Prince Desire today.

Of all the major roles at the Maryinsky, it is Albrecht in Giselle which has evolved most during the century. Nijinsky's Albrecht was not a spoiled aristocrat but a dreamer in search of an ideal love and beauty. It was dreaming, not scheming, that caused him to drive Giselle to insanity. Sergeyev's Albrecht was a treacherous aristocrat, his psychological interpretation much influenced by Stanislavsky. His florid style, however, was out of fashion by the 1950s, and criticized as overacting by the likes of Dolgushin, whose Albrecht possessed an extreme aristocratic reserve, far removed from the ideal positive Soviet hero.

Baryshnikov's Albrecht emphasized the moral responsibility of his actions; he never left the stage after the death of Giselle. Liepa will tell you that Albrecht is "a thinking, technical, theatrical role." Today, Igor Zelensky is not such a romantic: "No, it doesn't inspire me. It's one reason why I'm not really great ... You can't just think, Oh walk over here. Isn't dancing great? You have to think how you move your head, how you give your arm, how you hold your ballerina, how you do your cabrioles ... It's a lot of work."

If Generation X at the Maryinsky finds it hard to feel a romantic sensibility, what price the "progess" of two steps forward in technique and one step backwards in interpretation; fin de siecle could mean exactly that--these men of the Maryinsky are the last of their breed.

Top 20 Men of the Maryinsky 1899-1999

Pavel Gerdt               1844-1917
Nikolai Legat             1869-1937
Sergei Legat              1875-1905
Vaslav Nijinsky           1889-1950
Vakhtang Chabukiani       1910-92
Konstantin Sergeyev       1910-92
Nikita Dolgushin       b. 1938
Rudolf Nureyev            1938-93
Valery Panov           b. 1938
Yuri Soloviev             1940-77
Mikhail Baryshnikov    b. 1948
Konstantin Zaklinsky   b. 1955
Andris Liepa           b. 1962
Farukh Ruzimatov       b. 1963
Igor Zelensky          b. 1969
Vyacheslav Samodurov   b. 1972
Evgenyi Ivanchenko     b. 1973
Andrei Batalov         b. 1973
Serge Pakharev         b. 1975

Jeremy Noble divides his time between St. Petersburg and New York City as director of the Foundation for Russian Ballet.3