Laura Jacobs on the Bolshoi Ballet.

[kfw]

Laura Jacobs' writing about ballet is as beautiful as it gets. The first four paragraphs of her latest piece for The New Criterion are online here. Registration required.

The Bolshoi Ballet used to come through this country like a bulldozer pushing huge passions and vast landscapes into mountainous, murderous panoramas the dancers had to negotiate onstage. “Bolshoi” means “big” the previews always said. Bolshoi is Moscow, and the Mariinsky Ballet (called the Kirov from 1935 until the 1990s) is St. Petersburg. Bolshoi is salmon caviar to the Mariinsky’s Beluga. Bolshoi is Soviet, and the Mariinsky, candy box of the Czar, Imperial.

[dirac]

Thanks, this was posted on the Links yesterday as well. It's a good article.

[dirac]

Jacobs has some interesting comments on the placement of Bolshoi dancers:

Grigorovich put his lens not on niceties, delicacies, but on barn-burning bravura with a cinematic flow. That was the angle for thirty years.

And so one sees placement that sinks back behind the vertical, tailbones not quite as tucked under as they should be. If you allow the back to sway, even the littlest bit, you lower the pelvic ceiling over the legs, leaving less room for full rotation. It means you must compensate with other muscles, with winching adjustments lower on the leg. “It’s like from the knees down, I always thought,” says the arts writer Bob Sandla of Bolshoi turn-out, “rather than from deep in the hip.” Is there a gain? “Undoubtedly, a sense of security in their balance,” says the Ballet Review critic Don Daniels, “which helps them then produce effects either of weight or of being able to lift up off that into jumps. Because it’s amazing how the company still produces women who can jump.”

A similar adjustment can be seen in Bolshoi feet and that very stiff toe shoe the women have worn and many still wear.

I would be interested to hear any comments from those who saw the Bolshoi on its recent tour. Would you say the above is generally correct? (Please feel free to supply details from performance.)