600
RO .BERT GARIS
more interesting kind of excitement. What else can one say about a
company that regularly breaks up the coda of a
grand pas de deux
into
four sections? The Prince enters and does his leaps, then he leaves, the
music stops and he comes back for a bow; Odile enters and does her
fouettes, she leaves, the music stops and she comes back for a bow, and
so on.
It
takes no super-refinement to see that the expressive effect of
this coda should be one of gathering momentum and exhilaration, and
that the Bolshoi's methods work actively against this effect. I find this
failure representative of their style.
rrhe really beautiful part of their style shows up in calm slow group
dancing-the Dryads in
Don Quixote,
for instance, the Swans, the Wi–
lis. Innocent of exhibitionism, these girls move through these large un–
complicated movements with a full-bodied easy nobility and grandeur
that come to perfection in the dancing of the two principals who rep–
resent the Bolshoi's general style at its best-Samokhvalova and, to a
lesser degree, Karelskaya. Samokhvalova, with a homely face and with–
out the kind of body appropriate for heroine roles, comes to seem beauti–
ful because she gives all her "notes" their full value and she comes to
seem special because her full round limbs give this legato a very rich
tone. Bessmertnova is as highly gifted, certainly, but her face and figure
bring her within the range of our own standards, in terms of which she
has yet to achieve subtlety and individuality. Maximova, it seems to me,
never will: despite formidable expertise, her dancing seems destined al–
ways to match the Hollywood starlet ordinariness of her good looks. The
company has no new Ulanova, nor any prima ballerina to equal the
Kirov's radiant Sizova.
Vasiliev, Maximova's partner and husband, is far and away the
company's great dancer and one of the greatest I have seen. His face
and bearing are good-looking and manly,
if
somewhat ordinary, but his
large body is exceptionally handsome and he has phenomenal energy
and smooth and sensitive control over it. Most important, his dance
instinct is wonderfully alert and alive, he has real rhythm, coil and
spring. The most unusual thing about him is his total noneccentricity: he
doesn't seem to want to be a great star, he fits into the company easily
and willingly, and is simply immune to the vulgarity surrounding him. In
the corny foolishness of
Walpurgisnacht
(a Walt Disney-like animation of
Scenes from Poussin) he cooperates with every one of the cute effects,
yet he alone conveys the godlike pagan spontaneity of movement, the
cheerful glory of freedom, that the piece intends. He looks happy while
Maximova is looking business-like. I should like to see
him
in
Giselle
to
find out the extent of his more serious poetic expressivity, and I should
