Plisetskaya: still riveting at 71.

Editor's note: This month ballerina Maya Plisetskaya hosts Maya Ballet Competitions in St. Petersburg, on December 16; Moscow, December 18; and Paris, December 21. Last May in New York City, Plisetskaya spoke with Dance Magazine contributing editor Lynn Garafola. Valery Khasonov interpreted from the Russian.

NEW YORK CITY--It's a sweltering afternoon, with New Yorkers dropping from the heat, but Maya Plisetskaya looks fresh and every inch a star. Still dancing at seventy-one, the former Bolshoi ballerina has lost none of her charisma, even if the virtuosity that dazzled audiences thirty years ago is gone. As her Maya galas around the world have shown, Plisetskaya can still rivet an audience. She exerts the same magic in person. Under the spell of her voice and the animation of her features, the years melt away. Perched on a sofa for the interview, she seems ageless.

With obvious pleasure, Plisetskaya talks about her Maya Ballet Competition. Only two years old, it is a testament to her passion for new choreography, something she struggled to introduce at the Bolshoi. "What is important to me" Plisetskaya says, "is not only to discover interesting dancers but also interesting choreographers. In the first competition, everyone had to perform a fragment from Carmen Suite--not the Alberto Alonso version I danced, but something new. That was very interesting, because there were fifteen competitors and each did a different version, modern or classical: the choice was up to them. In the second competition, which took place in December 1996, everyone had to present a fragment from my Anna Karenina."

Although Plisetskaya is practically a Russian national treasure, there is no love lost between her and Russia's ballet authorities. When I ask, "Now that Yuri Grigorovich is no longer director of the Bolshoi Ballet, what has changed?" she carefully weighs her answer. "For me, nothing," she says. "Before, there was one boss in the company; now, there are two," she adds, referring to Vladimir Vasiliev, who became director of the Bolshoi Theatre in May 1995 and Vatcheslav Gordeyev, who now directs the ballet troupe.

Asked what she would do if she were offered the job of Bolshoi director, Plisetskaya responds, "I would refuse point blank. If I were to offer a word of advice, it would be to make new things. They are doing things today that they think are new, but were staged thirty years ago, like [John Cranko's] The Taming of the Shrew." In her deliberate, emphatic phrasing, one senses Plisetskaya's profound disillusionment with an institution that, in her opinion, not even the fall of the Soviet government has managed to change.

Plisetskaya came to artistic maturity in the late 1940s and 1950s, at the height of Soviet cultural isolation from the West. She did not participate in the Bolshoi's 1956 tour to London, and played only a minor role in the company's first American tour in 1959. In 1961, however, she appeared as a guest artist at the Paris Opera, the start of a long relationship with French companies and choreographers.

"All the time, politics," Plisetskaya remarks at one point during the interview. We are talking about Roland Petit, who in 1973 created La Rose Malade for her. Conceived as the third part of a ballet about Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Soviet poet who committed suicide in 1930, the work was actually choreographed on her in Marseilles. This was quite a coup in the 1970s, when it was nearly impossible for a Soviet citizen to work abroad. However, luck was with Plisetskaya. Louis Aragon, an eminence grise of the French Communist party, took an interest in the production and lobbied the Soviet authorities on Plisetskaya's behalf. "Since he was a party member," she says, "it was impossible to say no."

Maurice Bejart is another French choreographer with whom Plisetskaya has enjoyed a long association. She first danced with his Ballet of the Twentieth Century in 1976, when she appeared in Bolero. The following year, at the suggestion of her husband, composer Rodion Shchedrin, Bejart created Isadora for her, a "memory," as she puts it, of the American modern dancer that capitalized on Plisetskaya's dramatic presence and expressive use of gesture. Amazing as it may seem, she knew next to nothing about Bejart's repertoire before these guest appearances with his company. Even before these eye-opening encounters abroad, however, Plisetskaya had starred in a Western-style work at the Bolshoi itself--Alonso's 1967 Carmen. The former brother-in-law of ballerina Alicia Alonso, the choreographer was a veteran of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and Ballet Theatre, and a founding member of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. Alonso was also a supporter of Fidel Castro, which meant that in Soviet eyes, he was not a 'Western" choreographer, but a member of the Soviet Union's extended "family." For Plisetskaya, working with Alonso was a "fantastic experience." "After Swan Lake, legs like this," she says, demonstrating one of the ballet's cheesecake poses. Carmen, in fact, was her idea. When the Ballet Nacional paid its second visit to Moscow in 1964-5, the repertoire included one of the choreographer's works. "I saw it," she explains, "and was so taken with it that I immediately thought of Carmen, which for years I had dreamed of dancing. l said to him, 'Alberto, we need to make a ballet, because that's my dream.' So he returned to Moscow and choreographed Carmen."

Plisetskaya has witnessed many changes in ballet. She tells a story about the first Moscow Ballet Competition, where, to the dismay of the jury president, Galina Ulanova, one girl had an extension that reached to her partner's ear. "She was barred from the second round. Then, four years later, at the next competition, Nadezhda Pavlova, who had an even higher extension, won the gold medal. Now legs are up to here," she says, pointing to her head. Although she applauds the technical accomplishments of today's dancers, she feels that they "sometimes forget to listen to the music. The body should sing."

Riffling through more than a half-century of dance memories, Plisetskaya recalls her youthful admiration for the ballerina Marina Semyonova, a Bolshoi star of the 1930s and 1940s, who, at eighty-eight, remains on the company's roster as a coach. She has vivid memories, too, of Liane Dayde, the French ballerina who visited Moscow in 1958 with the Paris Opera Ballet. Plisetskaya was especially taken with her Giselle, the first performance of this role at the Bolshoi by a Western ballerina. As performed by Dayde, the ballet differed in certain details from the Bolshoi version. "For instance, in the second act," Plisetskaya explains, "she did the chaines on pointe, not demi-pointe as we did. After that, we changed it."

Another visitor she recalls with pleasure is Lupe Serrano, who danced with Erik Bruhn on American Ballet Theatre's first Russian tour in 1960. "Fantastic" is how she describes their partnership. Finally, she mentions Gelsey Kirkland, who attended one of her master classes in New York. "First-class ballerina," she states. "Absolutely great. For me she is the best American dancer."

A knock at the door signals that my hour with Plisetskaya is up. As we prepare to leave, I cannot resist telling her that among the treasures of my video collection is a 1956 film of her in Swan Lake. "The one with [Nikolai] Fadeyechev?" she asks incredulously. I nod. Then, with characteristic aplomb, she sums up her performance: Neplokho--not bad--for that time."