St Petersburg

Since the early 1930s most successful new productions at the Kirov had been choreodramas. Compared with traditional classic dance, of which people had tired, the form seemed to promise interesting things. Flames of Paris (1932; choreographer Vassily Vainonen), The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1934; Rostislav Zakharov), Laurencia (1939; Vakhtang Chabukiani), and Romeo and Juliet (1940; Mikhail Lavrovsky) all devoted more attention to plot development, psychological motivation, and dramatic expressiveness in corps scenes than to the invention of complicated dance steps. Most of them, including Romeo and Juliet, involved the outstanding theater director Sergei Radlov, a follower of Meyerhold, who was artistic director of the Kirov Theater in the second half of the 1930s.

Ivan Sollertinsky, a defender of the genre and a close friend of Shostakovich, wrote, “Orthodox balletomanes are not delighted by The Fountain of Bakhchisarai: not enough dancing! There are no dizzying variations with thirty-two fouettés, no pearls of the Italian school technique, no lush parade of symmetrically dancing corps-de-ballet masses in white tunics.”66 In response to these disgruntled “conservatives,” Sollertinsky claimed that “Bakhchisarai was a happy step forward”; it at least had dramatic action and living characters. He concluded, “No wonder the production was performed by the company with a true creative enthusiasm.”67

The truth was that the Kirov dancers enjoyed performing in the later much-maligned choreodramas because it gave them an opportunity to expand their repertoire and broaden their audience appeal. Marina Semyonova and Galina Ulanova were masters of classic dance, but many think some of their most vivid achievements were in choreodrama. Ulanova’s Juliet became her signature part in Russia and abroad. The two premiere danseurs of the Kirov in that period, Chabukiani and Alexei Ermolayev, made their mark in the new repertoire. Their leaps, poses, and dramatic insight delighted Leningrad audiences and prepared the way for Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Stalin closely watched the triumphs of the Kirov troupe; many of its brightest figures, including leading choreographers, were transferred to the Bolshoi. The vitality of choreodrama evaporated, and the genre took on parodie elements in “boy meets tractor” productions. The last effective choreodrama was The Bronze Horseman, produced by Zakharov in 1949 in Leningrad, with Konstantin Sergeyev and his real-life wife, Natalya Dudinskaya, in the roles of Yevgeny and his beloved Parasha.

Zakharov, following the party line, interpreted the conflict in The Bronze Horseman from the point of view of “historical inevitability.” Yevgeny, who lost his beloved in a terrible Petersburg flood, is wrong to blame Peter the Great, who founded Petersburg in a swampy place; state interests supersede ordinary men’s desires. To express that idea, the composer Reinhold Glière closed the ballet with an “Anthem to the Great City,” which became a kind of unofficial anthem of Leningrad.

But Sergeyev and Dudinskaya turned the choreographers’ ideas upside down, eliciting pity and compassion for their characters. Sergeyev sometimes brought tears to the eyes of the audience. “The downtrodden Yevgeny, transformed by love, seems to rise above all around him. Yevgeny in the world of dreams. And then, a man over-whelmed by disaster…. An enormous all-engulfing grief…. The mad scene is the highest note of human tragedy, the way Sergeyev did it,” recalled a viewer.68

Despite success and official recognition, the genre had implacable foes, among whom was the irascible Agrippina Vaganova, a former soloist at the Maryinsky and then a leading teacher of classical dance, who had trained a generation of principal dancers for the Leningrad ballet, including Marina Semyonova, Galina Ulanova, Natalya Dudinskaya, Alla Shelest, Irina Kolpakova, and Alla Osipenko. Vaganova created her own teaching method in the 1920s, which was published as Fundamentals of the Classic Dance in 1934 and reprinted many times at home and abroad. (She was helped in writing the book by Lyubov Blok, the widow of the great Petersburg poet, who had become a knowledgeable ballet historian.)

In her book Vaganova laid out the distinctive technical goals of the Petersburg ballet: clarity, precision of movement, and a clean line. Vaganova’s pedagogical forte was her ability to assess the artistic potential of her little pupils. As Fyodor Lopukhov recalled, “She took into account the individuality of each girl, the most subtle characteristics, which didn’t strike you right away but which the real pedagogue has the sensitivity to sense.”