Mariinsky dancers, husband and wife team, Irina and Mikhail Zavyalov. (Large jpg - 20K)
A new ballet theater -- the Chamber Ballet -- has recently opened in the city center.
Located next to the Mariinsky Theatre, the ballet theater should have everything going for it.
After all, its artistic director is Oleg Vinogradov, chief of the Kirov Ballet, and most of the dancers are from the Mariinsky Theater.
In addition, the new theater itself has been extensively refurbished. So why, then, is it all so uninspiring? The original theater, with its columns and wide corridors in the Soviet classical style, was known as the Theater of the Five Year Plan.
This gives you some idea as to how often it was used. No matter, it has been freshly painted and decorated with some attractive scenes taken from the ballet. Unfortunately the theater was not designed for ballet; the stage is too small for a dancer to extend himself without the risk of leaping into the pit. The wings are cramped, it's not very well heated, and the lighting is so unsophisticated that a costume's colors change as the dancer moves across the floor.
The St Petersburg Festival Orchestra is adequate, even if it doesn't always keep up with the dancers, but the sound is relayed through loudspeakers, making it no better than a tape recorder. There are no sets, therefore the dancing has to be of the highest quality -- and certainly on the opening night not many new ballet companies could boast Altynai Asylmuratova and Constantin Zaklinsky, who danced an excerpt from Scheherezade.
Some of the dancing proved just how much young talent there is in the Mariinsky. Among the line-up were such talents as Ulyana Lopatkina, Diana Vishnova, Andrei Batalov and Anastasia Volochkova. Most of them were dancing fragments from full-length ballets in the Kirov Ballet Company's repertoire. But surely a new theater should present something new? Perhaps this was a gala evening designed to tempt us with what would come later in the season.
Sadly, no. A week later there were still those rather too-well-known pieces clogging up the program: pieces like "Venetian Carnival" and "Festival of Flowers." Not even the magic of Farouq Ruzimatov could disguise the fact that this new theater is offering us more of the old. The ballet master Dmitri Bryantsev was specifically lured from Moscow by Oleg Vinogradov. However, one has to ask why the program is made up mainly of classical ballet when it is well known that Mr Bryantsev has no enthusiasm for the classical discipline. Why not give us what he enjoys? Who or what is this theater for? At the opening night, Mr Malkov, general director of the Mariinsky Theater, went out of his way to say that the Chamber Ballet is not a subsidiary of the Mariinsky. Then why is it so packed with its dancers?
Is this theater a calculated attempt to cash in on foreigners and tourists? With all the notices written in Russian we think not. Certainly it did not appeal to the two Americans who walked out when we paid a visit. The basis of the company is formed from what used to be known as the Small Troupe of the Kirov, a company originally designed to move away from a traditional reliance on the 19th-century standards.
It's not that this period is uninteresting, it's just that some of these dancers have been performing these pieces so many times and for so long it is impossible to make them look fresh.
Neither does a plethora of Mariinsky stars raise the standard of others. To enjoy an evening of the Chamber Ballet and be able to weed out the good from the bad you need to know what you are looking at. Where is the sense of occasion? How could such a good idea have no atmosphere? Simply because it lacks a guiding artistic principle.
What could it have been? Maybe an experimental studio, prepared to take risks with neo-classical and modern dance, such as is the norm with large Western theaters.
Perhaps it could have been the acknowledged stepping stone for young dancers at the Mariinsky. Indeed much of the program so far has been made up of potential soloists trying out on stage what they are rehearsing next door at the Mariinsky.
What about a place to try out revivals of either neglected Russian choreographers -- Lopuokhov, Tchabukiani, Jacobson -- or rarely performed ballets?
We do not ask that there should be expensive sets or lavish costumes; we can see those at the Mariinsky. We are looking for excitement and innovation, or just something we have not seen before. If our criticism is serious, that is because we take ballet seriously enough to want this new theater to succeed. So far, it is a sellout because it does not face up to the need for Russian ballet to prove that it can do more than merely dance on the spot. Better groovy than stuck in the groove.