Russian Barre Remains High

The applicants still come from all over the country, though the country is smaller now -- Russia has about half the population of the U.S.S.R. The student body has shrunk from more than 450 to about 300, but the competition to get in is as fierce as ever. The physical requirements are "more demanding" now: "We're looking for children who will be taller, thinner, with better legs" than their predecessors, Asylmuratova said. The academy asks parents to come to the school during the application process; the ballet instructors want to see what they look like as a clue to how the 10-year-olds may develop.

Today's students work as hard as their predecessors: 10-12 hours a day, six days a week, from the age of 10 to 18, when they graduate -- well, the fraction of the entering class that makes it all the way through. Today's dance faculty consists of 80 instructors.

The curriculum is also identical, with one addition. Every student spends thousands of hours at the barre, repeating the basic classical movements. They take classes in character dancing, duets, acting and -- the one new addition -- "modern." Vaganova Academy, like the Kirov/Maryinski, has never been famous for anything but classical Russian ballet, so this is a real departure.

By luck my visit in June coincided with the annual graduation performance, a full-blown ballet concert in the lovely old Maryinski Theater, an elegant, six-tiered opera house decorated in peacock blue and gold that has been the company's home since 1894. Post photographer Lucian Perkins and I were invited to the final rehearsal of the program, then to the concert itself.

The most ambitious item on the program was "Chopiniana," a "composition in one act" to music by Chopin, choreographed by Michel Fokine and first performed at the Maryinski in 1908. It is a genuine classic, featuring two lines of perfectly coordinated ballerinas dancing behind a rotating cast of principals, led by two women and one man.

One of the leading ladies for this performance was Anna Lavrinyenko, 18, a Muscovite who began her ballet studies at the rival Bolshoi Ballet academy in the capital before transferring to the Vaganova three years ago. Why the switch? "Because this school is better," she said emphatically.

Many of the students at Vaganova have some family connection to the dance. Asylmuratova's parents in Kazakhstan were both dancers. But Lavrinyenko came up with the idea of becoming a ballerina on her own, after seeing a ballet when she was 6. Her father is in business renovating apartments. She gave up an ordinary childhood to devote herself to this dream; she willed it to come true.

"We had very little time to take it easy," she said of her student years, just coming to an end. We talked while she did stretches and splits in a corridor in the rabbit warren that is the Maryinski's backstage area. At Vaganova "we were almost always in our tight little circle" of fellow dancers. "Sometimes you just wanted to be alone, or with people who knew nothing about ballet." Mostly it was practice, study and watch; the students are given tickets to virtually every Maryinski ballet performance.

Was it worth it? She answered quickly and firmly: yes. A few minutes later I saw one reason why. Anna is a budding star. On the Maryinski rehearsal stage, buried somewhere in the bowels of the old building, the girlish adolescent with whom I had been talking a moment before was banished, and in an instant Anna was transformed into a serious artist.

With a piano playing the Chopin music that the full orchestra will perform two days later, this year's graduates (augmented by some younger students) went through the rehearsal under Asylmuratova's stern eye. The director paid as much attention to the corps as to the principals. "Listen!" She ordered, using a microphone. "You must hear the music. Light feet! Light feet! Feel each other."

Lavrinyenko learned in May that she would be invited to join the Kirov/Maryinski company after graduation, the ultimate payoff for her years of hard work. This set her apart from her classmates: Only three girls and six boys from this year's class were taken by the main company, she said. She will start in the corps de ballet, just as Asylmuratova did in 1978. Four years later she became a principal dancer.

A note on finances: Lavrinyenko's starting salary as a new Kirov/Maryinski dancer will be a little less than $200 a month. Her pal Yelena Silyakova, with whom she stretched that morning, will dance in St. Petersburg's second theater, the Maly, for about $110 a month. These are the facts of artistic life in the new Russia. The entire budget for the Vaganova Academy is just about $1 million a year for more than 100 faculty, half a dozen administrators, support staff and 350 students, plus a separate pedagogical department that teaches ballet teachers. In this Russia the arts are a labor of love. Luckily, a lot of people are prepared to share a lot of love.

On Sunday, the theater was packed for the noon performance. Young people, largely friends and siblings of the dancers, made up about a fourth of the crowd -- the Maryinski rarely has such a young audience. "Chopiniana" was the first number, 30 minutes of glorious dancing by 22 young women and a single male soloist. The costumes, white lace and chiffon, were splendid (specially made for the academy for this occasion). Lavrinyenko danced with consummate grace and palpable emotion. The two lines of women in the corps danced as one; their arms (a Vaganova specialty) rose and fell as though propelled by a single body. When the half-hour ended, the crowd applauded and cheered.

For another 90 minutes, the 263rd graduating class of this oldest of the world's ballet schools performed magnificently. It was extremely difficult to believe that these performers were all 18 or younger and just graduating from the equivalent of high school. These hardly looked like students -- they were fully formed professionals, impeccably trained and rehearsed.

Sitting in my armchair in the orchestra, listening to the bravos tumble down onto the stage, I realized that the grand old Maryinski Theater is a kind of church, and ballet is the religion. The religion survived 74 years of communism, has survived 14 years of new Russian capitalism, and will continue to survive for a long time to come. Religion may not always be rational, but when the faith is strong, it cannot be denied.