Last NY conference
April 1, 2008
Kirov’s Travel Plans Exclude the Director
By JENNIFER DUNNING
The Kirov Ballet begins its New York engagement on Tuesday with a program not at its usual home away from home, the Metropolitan Opera House, but at City Center for the first time. That will be the most transparent change to audiences. What they won’t be seeing is the turbulence behind the scenes, where questions about the ballet’s leadership surround the company.
Conflicting reports about Makhar Vaziev, director of the Kirov Ballet, the foreign touring name for the Maryinsky Ballet company of St. Petersburg, turned into a will-he-or-won’t-he game: Would he accompany his troupe to the United States as Valery Gergiev, the Maryinsky’s overall director, said last week that he expected, or would Mr. Vaziev remain at home to contemplate retirement? A handwritten sign posted on Sunday at the artists’ entrance to the Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg seemed to confirm his absence: Yuri Fateyev, a company member assigned to oversee the Balanchine repertory, would be responsible for the dancers on tour.
On Monday the company’s New York presenter, Sergei Danilian, confirmed that Mr. Vaziev was not with the troupe. He said that temporary leadership of the company had been handed over to Mr. Fateyev, a decision Mr. Gergiev conveyed at a 2 a.m. meeting on Monday. Mr. Gergiev, who is in New York to conduct the Metropolitan Opera, was unavailable to comment on the latest developments.
Where Mr. Vaziev stands now is uncertain. He could not be reached for comment either, and a Maryinsky Theater spokeswoman also refused to comment. Last week, however, Mr. Gergiev said the ballet director had told him that he would discuss retiring this summer. What is clear is that Mr. Gergiev is unhappy with Mr. Vaziev.
In an interview on Friday about the City Center season that touched on other topics, Mr. Gergiev said he had been disappointed by some of Mr. Vaziev’s recent choreography choices.
The current Maryinsky repertory includes an intriguing selection of 19th-century and Soviet classics and lesser-known Soviet ballets, as well as ballets by Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska and August Bournonville. The 21st century is represented by choreographers unfamiliar to most American dancegoers.
Finding new choreography has been a problem for the Kirov, Mr. Gergiev said. He has asked the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, to create a new version of a Soviet classic, “The Little Humpbacked Horse,” set to music by Rodion Shchedrin, as well as a new version of Stravinsky’s “Baiser de la Fée.”
“We can’t afford doing things that are mediocre,” Mr. Gergiev said. Though he described the problem as “the biggest question mark” of Mr. Vaziev’s 11-year directorship of the company, Mr. Gergiev said another area of disagreement was Mr. Gergiev’s strong desire to enlist seasoned company principals like Igor Zelensky, Uliana Lopatkina, Diana Vishneva and Yulia Makhalina to work with the youngest generation of Kirov dancers. “I’m not 100 percent sure that we have created the atmosphere and situation today where all these young people are immediately helped to the maximum.”
Mr. Vaziev, a former lead dancer with the company, succeeded Oleg Vinogradov, the politically adept but increasingly unpopular director who appointed Mr. Vaziev as an administrative assistant and whose tenure ended when Mr. Gergiev took over the Maryinsky Theater in 1996.
Today Mr. Gergiev talks of the urgent need to revitalize the ballet and opera by making it more accessible to new generations of theatergoers. “We have to work hard on making ‘Sleeping Beauty’ the property of totally, completely new people, millions of them.
“I remember myself being 11 or 12 years old, at Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Tsar’s Bride.’ The recitative was in Russian. That was a huge thing for me. I was leaning forward trying not to miss a single word. It was so exciting. And this is something I want to translate into the ballet world.”
For its current run (through April 20) New York audiences will be seeing the Kirov in a smaller and more egalitarian-feeling theater than the Met. The larger house has not been available to the Kirov for a full season since its last performances in New York, said Mr. Danilian, producer of the City Center engagement. The Kirov performed at the Met in 2002 as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.
But the Kirov will hardly be slumming. City Center has had an illustrious ballet history as home to New York City Ballet and the Joffrey Ballet in their formative years. It can accommodate large-scale spectacles like the Kingdom of the Shades act from Marius Petipa’s “Bayadère” as well as the flashy “Don Quixote” and “Diana and Acteon” pas de deux, all of which the Kirov will be performing. But Michel Fokine’s more intimate “Dying Swan” and “Spectre de la Rose,” also in the repertory, would be lost on a larger stage.
Taken together, most of the 18 full ballets and excerpts in the New York season chronicle the history of the Kirov, considered the bedrock of classical ballet purity and sophistication. The City Center chronicle begins in 1847 with the Grand Pas from Petipa’s “Paquita” and continues with Fokine and George Balanchine, another though very different rebel, who trained as a child at the Maryinsky and began his choreographic experiments there. William Forsythe, an iconoclast with no relation to the Kirov, will also be represented at City Center with a full program of dances from the 1980s and ’90s.
Some may have trouble accepting Mr. Forsythe’s turbulent, antitheatrical ballets as consistent with the tradition of Kirov lucidity. “I don’t take Forsythe as the child of this tradition,” Mr. Gergiev said in the interview. “But I think Forsythe was amazed to discover how his choreography started to interact with the traditions.”
Mr. Gergiev said that he expected Mr. Zelensky, a New York favorite who has been absent from the Kirov while working with the Novosibirsk Ballet Theater, to perform here on Sunday. He also suggested that New York audiences might want to keep an eye out for several dancers - among them Viktoria Tereshkina and Leonid Sarafanov - who are “liked, maybe loved” in St. Petersburg but almost unknown here.
Will the Kirov overcome this trouble in paradise? The company has survived tectonic shifts over the past century and a half, sending distinctive performers and rule-breaking choreographers out into the world armed with a sturdy root aesthetic and elements of style that have remained freshly alive and nourishing throughout their lives.
Sophia Kishkovsky contributed reporting from Moscow and Daniel J. Wakin from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/arts/dance/01kiro.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
March 28, 2008
Arts, Briefly
Leadership of Kirov in Question
By DANIEL J. WAKIN; Compiled by LAWRENCE VAN GELDER
Uncertainty swirled around the leadership of the Kirov Ballet of the Maryinsky Theater of St. Petersburg, Russia, on Thursday, five days before it was due to arrive for a three-week residency at City Center in New York. The Kirov’s director, Makhar Vaziev, has given conflicting signals about whether he was leaving the company, saying as recently as Wednesday night that he was retiring, said Sergei Danilian, the company’s promoter in New York. “One day he’s in; one day he’s out,” Mr. Danilian said. The Maryinsky’s overall director, the conductor Valery Gergiev, said in an interview that he fully expected to Mr. Vaziev to come to New York. He acknowledged Mr. Vaziev was “not totally happy,” and he said Mr. Vaziev told him he would discuss retiring this summer, once the busy Kirov season is over. Mr. Vaziev, who has led the company since 1995, could not be reached for comment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/arts/28arts-LEADERSHIPOF_BRF.html?pagewanted=print