From 'The Tablet' 16 June 2005

In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated - Daria Pavlenko


When Uliana Lopatkina steps on to the Royal Opera House stage in Swan Lake next Monday, she will portray not only the spellbound Odette, victim of an evil sorcerer, but also something altogether deeper: the essence of the Russian soul. Lopatkina is considered the prima ballerina of her generation. As her body unfolds, she suggests a deep fatalism with an instinct for sorrow beyond fathoming. Lopatkina is a star among the many stars of the Kirov Ballet (Royal Opera House to 30 July). She has a special place in her company, with an unusual license to accept or decline offered roles.

Intriguingly she will not appear in one of the highlights of the Kirov season, a programme of works by the American choreographer William Forsythe (24 July at 2.00pm and 7.30pm). The reason? “Their ideas are not based on human feelings, on the human soul. The concept of the ballets is plasticity and pattern.” When Lopatkina speaks of ‘soul’, a religious nuance can be assumed. Like many Kirov dancers, she is a committed member of the Russian Orthodox Church. (A telling Kirov image: standing in the wings waiting to dance a difficult solo, dancers frequently make the Sign of the Cross before they go onstage.).

While William Forsythe is a cult figure in the West, Kirov dancers disagree about whether the company should dance his ballets. Detractors see his work as a frontal assault on the ‘gracious rhetoric’ of classical ballet. Forsythe has sought, in his own words, “to manipulate the language of ballet to see how far it can go before it becomes unrecognisable.” His works are characterised by athletic attack with disjointed movements and positions. Bodies curve away from their central axis. Dancers in duets are combative rather than mutually supportive. According to the German critic Horst Koegler, “It is as if the molecules of classical ballet have been dissected, marinated in acid and put together again, though not in their former form.”

Forsythe finds classical ballet’s strict insistence on form and precision oppressive, dismissing it as a fetish. A flavour of this emerged in an exchange between Forsythe and the German Jesuit and art historian Friedhelm Mennekes. Fr Mennekes recalled how at the Offertory the priest washes his hands (“Lord wash away my iniquities, cleanse me from my sins”). He is not worthy, he acknowledges his humility. Here, argued Fr Mennekes, “We find the connection with art, since art also makes people humble.” But Forsythe, in response, could point to no similarly redemptive strain in his art. “If we talk about sin, in terms of ballet we have all lost, haven't we? Ballet is something that you can only approach and it is only meant in its arrogance to be failed at. From the experts' point of view, you cannot perform a successful ballet.”

Forsythe says that his opponents confuse ‘deconstruction’ with ‘destruction’. That, he says, is not his aim, but – rather – to make the forms of classical ballet suitable for the twenty first century. There is sense to this, as a grammar forged in the formal dances of the court of Louis XIV is scarcely relevant in every circumstance today. What is also true is that Lopatkina’s pleading of soullessness in Forsythe’s work can be read as aesthetic and social conservatism.

The debate has particular force in the context of the Kirov. It is not merely a great lyric theatre company, but also a powerful moral presence in today’s Russia. Founded by the Tsars, it survived the Communist era because Lenin accepted that “a theatre is necessary not so much for propaganda, as to rest hard workers after their daily work. And it is still too early to file away in the archives our heritage from bourgeois art.” Under communism dance explicitly served the state. Technical virtuosity and bravura exhibitionism projected the values of the USSR. If the Bolshoi in Moscow was the quintessence of this, the Kirov managed to preserve the refinements of the pre-Communist era. It was, after all, the company that gave the world the three great Petipa/Tchaikovsky ballets The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and The Nutcracker.

The conductor Valery Gergiev, who is the overall artistic director of the Kirov (and more influential in Russia than many politicians), sees one of his theatre’s vital functions as being "to agitate souls." Hence the introduction of new choreography from the West. Many Kirov dancers welcome the opportunity to dance Forsythe ballets. The ballerina Daria Pavlenko, one of the company’s emerging stars (and also a religious believer), told me last week how much she enjoyed dancing Forsythe’s Steptext (which is altogether the deconstructive exercise suggested by the ballet’s title). “It emphasises femininity, but the femininity is expressed more strongly. I can express it more openly and more frankly than with those beautiful movements with a straight back of classical ballet. It’s not ugly – just different.” If, Pavlenko argues, a great art gallery exhibits contemporary work alongside old masters, so also should the Kirov.

Audiences in London will see Pavlenko dance the lead in Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, a plotless work, which is more aggressively cool than classically decorous. Pavlenko is meticulous in her preparation for her classical roles such as Giselle and Odette/Odile in Swan Lake. She reads herself carefully into the history of the works and the background myths in which they are rooted. I asked her how she prepared for In the Middle. “Don’t laugh. I have been reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. It’s not that I am trying to portray the character of Nastassya Filippovna. I avoid talking about direct associations. But even though a hundred years has passed, I can feel a link. It’s a little bit frightening and scaring. But, yes, I can feel its resonance, when I come to dance Forsythe.”

And so, it seems, the Russian soul is being smuggled through the back door into the ballets of William Forsythe.