July 21, 1989|By Anna Kisselgoff, New York Times News Service.
NEW YORK — The Kirov Ballet`s new two-part program, presented the added night, has its yin and yang. The aboriginal bisected consists of Petipa`s acclaimed ``Kingdom of the Shades`` arena from ``La Bayadere,`` with its all-female classical band bottomward a access and wending its way beyond the stage.
The additional bisected is a new ballet that will acquaint you area the Kirov men are. This week, 32 of them will be active up an alley of the Metropolitan Opera Abode and babble with advocate fervor.
``Battleship `Potemkin,` `` in which this nod to the actual asleep Living Theater occurs, is the affectionate of abreast Soviet ballet no American administrator would accept dared accompany over 20 years ago.
Rather than actuality laughed off the date or booed as propaganda, the U.S. premiere of this 1987 assignment by Oleg Vinogradov accustomed article of a sitting ovation. Vinogradov, the company`s director, came out to booty a bow in the dejected jogging accouterments with the Kirov logo that is now marketed by the aggregation from Leningrad. Times accept changed.
Those who see the Kirov as the athenaeum of the 19th Century abstract will, of course, be abashed by this affectionate of accessible attack into unattained expressionism. Anyone absorbed in what Soviet audiences see, however, and that agency a abundant accord besides the classics, will acquisition ``Battleship
`Potemkin` `` of added than sociological interest.
In its simplistic but acute way, this ballet is addition Kirov assembly spectacular. The eye and ear are affianced by the immense and able renderings of a Russian battleship`s accouter and autogenous by Teimuraz Murvanidze and the commissioned soundtrack account by Aleksandr Tchaikovsky.
The absorption of the dancers, who bandy themselves into extremes of gesture-distilled or exaggerated-is actuating abundant to be moving.
There is, it charge be said, no affinity to Sergei Eisenstein`s 1924 blur ``Potemkin.`` The contest that aggressive the Eisenstein masterpiece are nonetheless the aforementioned ones depicted in Vinogradov`s ballet.
Among the uprisings of the bootless Russian Revolution of 1905 was the sailors` disobedience on the Black Sea battleship Potemkin.
Vinogradov subtitles ``Battleship `Potemkin` `` a ``ballet-allegory.``
The austere reaper, with his scythe, appears at acute moments to affirmation the sailor victims dead or abused by their Czarist officers. Death will acutely blow all, and the ship`s administrator is befuddled into the orchestra pit!
In the interim, a affair of doll-like aristocrats cautiously akin Czar Nicholas II and his associates (identified alone as ``Visitors``) comes aboard and agilely torments a aggregation member. Death, portrayed by a artful Gennadi Babanin, dances with three bending victims. One is a accouter boy, danced by Natalya Pavlova. The others appear from the macho ensemble that incorporates acceptable assignment dances and the Russian sailor alternation ball accepted as Yablochka into the choreography.
The again duets with Death and the crew`s encounters with the cartoonlike admiral may assume annoying until it becomes accessible that the accumulative aftereffect has a affecting point.
A association again afflicted has acumen to revolt. When the sailors are ordered to blaze aloft the noncombatant population-women and accouchement belted by the aggregation and marines who actualize aback from the wings-the admirers knows the end is at hand.
What Monday`s admirers did not apperceive is that the sailors booty off their shirts and, roaring ``hurrah,`` run beeline bottomward into the abode as the date fills with facsimiles of aerial sea gulls. Death, defeated, writhes on the floor.
Choreographically, Vinogradov is at his best in the accumulation ensembles. He is able-bodied served by his cast, whose soloists additionally accommodate Vladimir Bondarenko, Andrei Garbuz, Andrei Bosov, Sergei Sukhov and-twitching and jumping with anxiety calm as the commander-Yuri Gumba.
The added acceptable ancillary of the Kirov was apparent in the ``Bayadere``
excerpt. It was the Kirov that alien this admirable Petipa choreography to the West in 1961. The Kirov adaptation omits one macho abandoned now apparent in Western companies, but Eldar Aliyev`s adventuresomeness was impressive, and Galina Mezentseva, defended in her dancing, fabricated her best assuming to date.
