For Bolshoi Ballet, Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

MOSCOW -- Bolshoi dancer Ekaterina Krysanova, 21, performs a nearly 180-degree arabesque, her body stretched like hot taffy. Her movement is stunning, yet this rehearsal is a bit of a struggle. She screws up her face and lifts her leg again, counting the beats out loud.

This is not "Cinderella," nor is it "Don Quixote," full-length ballets any Bolshoi dancer knows by heart (and which the company will perform later this month in Washington). This is Twyla Tharp's "In the Upper Room," an American contemporary dance with twists and shimmies, falls and backward running. It's the running blind that gives the Russians the most trouble. That and wearing sneakers.

The work has been a physical and psychological challenge. With music by Philip Glass, "In the Upper Room" opens here Feb. 13 on a rare American triple bill that includes George Balanchine's "Serenade" and "Misericors" by Christopher Wheeldon. All three ballets are Bolshoi premieres.

"This is not something we are used to," Krysanova says at the end of the rehearsal. "And it's very difficult, of course -- at times it seems we are not dancing with the music. But afterward, you feel you have opened yourself up."

That contemporary dance has finally come to the Bolshoi says a lot about its exciting, if a little uncertain, future. For the past three years, Artistic Director Alexei Ratmansky has been consumed by his mission: To take the Bolshoi Ballet -- half of it unhappily -- into the 21st century.

Ratmansky has challenged this company, renowned worldwide for its Soviet-era superhuman dancers, to perform choreography they never dreamed of dancing. At the same time, he has begun reconstructing long-forgotten ballets from the 1920s, the era of the Russian avant-garde. He also continues to feature the sensationally athletic works of longtime director Yuri Grigorovich.

"The Bolshoi is still considered a place for museum pieces by many people," says Ratmansky, 38. "I try to argue. I think it's not possible for the company to live as a museum. But the classics are our heritage and our roots -- if not us, who will preserve these works? We have to breathe new life into them. The old guard are really afraid of change, yet we need to see how we can preserve the tradition and bring ourselves up to today."

Ratmansky returned to Moscow in 2003 to reconstruct the ballet "The Bright Stream" in honor of Dmitri Shostakovich's 100th birthday anniversary in September 2006. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin proclaimed the ballet "a falsehood" in 1936 -- he didn't like peasants on point -- and it languished, unperformed, for 70 years. Ratmansky's remake of "Bright Stream" has been a critical and popular success in Russia and abroad.

He had never danced in the Bolshoi or held an artistic directorship, so it shocked the young choreographer when Bolshoi general director Anatoly Iksanov asked Ratmansky to take the helm as artistic director in 2004. Ratmansky's contract ends June 30. The administration, despite some serious grumbling among the Bolshoi's stars, has asked him to continue his renewal of one of the biggest brands to come out of the Soviet Union, its national ballet.

"The most important thing about Alexei Ratmansky is that he doesn't deny our traditions, but he is revitalizing them," says Anna Galayda, ballet critic for the newspaper Vedomosti. "He knows Russian dance and he worked in the West. He synthesizes classical traditions with a modern approach. He has been able to change our attitudes. He is the first native choreographer who is not a copy of Grigorovich."

Ratmansky has also been a lightning rod for some audiences and for some longtime members of the company who charge that he is too modern, too Western and too ready to usurp the Grigorovich legacy.

Grigorovich, 80, who still lives in Moscow, enjoyed what some called a despotic tenure of more than 30 years, and taught the Bolshoi one style of absolutely proud, powerful dancing known as Soviet style. A trail of short-lived directors found his footsteps daunting.