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Alexandra Tomalonis
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Bolshoi's Tragic Carpet Ride
Overloaded Production of Petipa's 'Bayadere' Lacks Direction

Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
June 15, 2002; Page C5

Watching "La Bayadere" is like going to a rummage sale. You might find some treasures in there, but you've got to paw through a lot of stuffed parrots and lava lamps to get to them. It's the 19th-century ballet repertory's messiest work, and the Bolshoi Ballet gave it a messy performance Thursday night at the Kennedy Center Opera House. There's a lot of scope for imagination in "La Bayadere," choreographed in 1877 by Marius Petipa for the Bolshoi's great rival, the Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg. The hero does drugs, the second ballerina is a murderess, and the plot contains hints of a war between church and state, not to mention sexual abuse by the clergy.

Set in India, "La Bayadere" was one of those "exotic" ballets that turned the theater into a magic carpet for 19th-century audiences. The program says that the sets and costumes were "reproduced according to the original design," but did Solor, the male lead, really have to wear a lavender outfit with air vents in the trousers back then? The music, by Ludwig Minkus, can be most charitably described as tuneful hack work.

The plot looks more complicated onstage than it needs to be. Solor, a warrior, loves Nikia, a temple dancer (bayadere). So does the Brahman who "momentarily forgets his vows of celibacy" and makes a play for her. She declines in disgust. He fumes.

Meanwhile, the Rajah wants Solor as a husband for his daughter, Gamzatti. Gamzatti isn't pleased that Solor has a lover. Nikia isn't excited about Solor's marriage. At the wedding ceremony, to which Gamzatti thoughtfully invites Nikia, the temple dancer is bitten by a poisonous snake hidden in a basket of flowers (by order of Gamzatti).

The Brahman has the antidote handy, but won't give it to Nikia unless she'll love him. Nikia would rather die, and does. Solor takes to his bed with a hookah and dreams about being reunited with his lost love. When he wakes up, the gods punish everyone by making the temple collapse.

Love, murder, betrayal, lust, revenge, reconciliation and the triumph of justice. How could you mess this one up?

Bolshoi Artistic Director Yuri Grigorovich manages very nicely. He is credited in the program for the "revival and choreographic revision," despite the fact that many of the divertissements and the entire third act are Petipa's. He has replaced the pantomime speeches, which explain what's going on, with vague gestures -- a flailing arm here, an undirected pointing finger there -- that look like silent movie acting in Martian and make the long passages where the music is screaming the story (Minkus is not subtle) both boring and senseless.

There are scenes that look as though they haven't been directed in decades. The dancers seem to have been left to their own devices and start out doing something that recalls the libretto but finish up doing something else, whatever it is.

Grigorovich hasn't cut out the many processions, so beloved of 19th-century audiences and so boring to many today. But instead of walking, the dancers do a mini-goose step or a slow-motion prance while carrying their palm fronds, or their spears, or shooting arrowless bows, and it looks patently absurd.

Many of the dances date from the original production. Others (such as the Golden Idol variation, danced by a man covered from head to toe with gold body paint) were added in this century. Some group dances are Grigorovich's and look like outtakes from his "Spartacus."

The first act sets the plot in motion; the second has always been a great variety show: Women dance with stuffed parrots attached to their arms. A young woman performs a solo while balancing a water jug on her head. (In other productions, she's usually accompanied by two little girls who beg her for a drink.) Men in red-brown body paint, whipped into a frenzy by a dancer leaping while pounding on a giant tom-tom, are the backup group for a couple (she wears a grass skirt and sparkle bra) that dances with what can only be called wild abandon.

And then, in the third act, the mood totally changes and we see one of the most sublime passages in all of ballet. Solor's dream of reconciliation with Nikia begins with specters zig-zagging down a mountain, performing arabesque penchee after arabesque penchee, until all 32 of them are onstage.

The Bolshoi uses three ramps rather than one, so that instead of a straight-line descent, the effect is multilayered. Danced in the dimmest of lighting -- lit only, it seems, by the women's white tutus -- the dancers look as though they're dancing in the air.

The dancing throughout was as uneven as the staging. As Nikia, Anna Antonicheva was especially effective in the second act, in her plaintive dance at the wedding. She seems more comfortable in dances where she has something specific to express than in strictly classical solos, as in the third act, where she's technically secure but cold.

Nikolai Tsiskaridze (Solor) is an exciting dancer, but a sloppy one. He has a few spectacular moves, especially the jumps in the third act, but delivers them as though they're tricks rather than classical dancing, and seems to lose interest toward the end of a variation.

Maria Allash's Gamzatti seems too nice to be a murderess, but danced her solos well. Denis Medvedev as the Golden Idol was spectacular, delivering the cleanest dancing of the evening. As with the previous night's "Swan Lake," however, the laurel wreaths go to the corps, who held the terrifying slow balances in the third act with aplomb.