New York culture mavens are notoriously jaded. After all, you can see
almost anything here. But the past three weeks were a treat for even the
most blase ballet fans. The Kirov Ballet was in town, for the first time
in six years.

The engagement that ended Sunday, bringing some 100 dancers (plus
orchestra) to City Center, gave New Yorkers a rare look at some of the
most talented performers in the world  some now at the top, and some on
their way up.

Barring a trip to St. Petersburg, when else would one get a chance to
see Uliana Lopatkina perform in Fokine's "The Dying Swan"? Less than
five minutes long, this piece was made famous by the great Anna Pavlova,
and Lopatkina, who has a delicate, mournful face and long, expressive
arms, is known as one of the best.

Indeed, she managed to make the last moments of a swan  something that
could lend so easily to farce  seem unaffected, by immersing herself in
the melancholy of Saint-Saens' music, and in the moment. It helped that
she was performing on the smaller City Center stage, where faces are in
sharper focus, rather than the Metropolitan Opera House, the usual
theater for Kirov visits.

The stint began with excerpts from ballets by the 19th-century master
Marius Petipa. A few of the vignettes had a stuffy feel, and some
dancers felt they needed to pause ever so slightly and invite applause
after major steps. But they were a good introduction to the famously
rigorous technique of this 200-year-old company.

In the Slavic-accented "Raymonda," the dark-haired Victoria Tereshkina
signaled she was one to watch as the weeks went on. She was full of
precision, confidence and verve the following week in the difficult
choreography of "Etudes," by Harald Lander, which begins with the
dancers as ballet students at the barre, progressing to virtuoso turns
and leaps and seemingly enough grand endings for four ballets.

 

Another standout here was Leonid Sarafanov, who is well into his 20s,
but with his blond cropped hair and boyish face, looks like he's all of
14. Sarafanov dances like a graceful virtuoso gymnast, and nowhere more
so in the contemporary work of William Forsythe, where Sarafanov ripped
off one exhausting combination after another in "The Vertiginous Thrill
of Exactitude," set to Franz Schubert.

As for Tereshkina, her smile morphed into a steelier expression as she
threw herself into the edgier Forsythe material. Forsythe, an American
who has worked for decades in Germany, loves to toy with the boundaries
of what's onstage and what's not, what's performance and what isn't.

He does it with lighting  keeping the house lights on while his dancers
begin "Steptext," for example  or by having dancers suddenly start
acting as if they're in the rehearsal studio, redoing a step and
discussing it aloud, as in "Approximate Sonata."

For Kirov purists, these ballets may not have been the favorites. But
the dancers seemed thrilled to be performing them, as if suddenly jolted
with an electric charge. The palpable energy in these works was in
marked contrast to Fokine's "Le Spectre de la Rose," which seemed dated
and dusty.

"In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated," a clear crowd-pleaser, featured
Tereshkina in the lead role once danced by Sylvie Guillem at the Paris
Opera Ballet, as well as the gorgeous, towering redhead Ekaterina
Kondaurova. The latter's dramatic leg extension might have seemed showy
in classical ballet but was perfectly suited to this work, in which
dancers kicked their legs into dizzying poses to the crashing, crackling
sounds of Thom Willems' score.

Diana Vishneva launched into "Steptext" with abandon. The gorgeously
proportioned Vishneva is well known in these parts due to the spring
seasons she now spends with American Ballet Theatre, in classical roles
such as Giselle, Odette/Odile and Juliet.

The Vishneva performances here were more memorable that those she gave
with her strangely unsatisfying show in February at City Center, "Beauty
in Motion," featuring three works commissioned just for this powerful,
expressive dancer who is at the height of her powers. Unfortunately,
that program was a disappointing mix of the inaccessible and the
borderline trite. Vishneva lovers had much more to admire in her varied
Kirov performances.