A Pipe Dream That's a Hit

The version of "La Bayadere" that the Kirov will dance at the Kennedy Center ends with "Kingdom of the Shades," nearly three dozen corps de ballet dancers moving as one in synchronized beauty. (By Gene Schiavone)

When the Kirov's sets for this final act, as well as the choreography for it, were lost in the early 1900s, the company did not venture to restore them until just recently, when researchers devised a fuller "reconstructed" account. The Kirov now possesses two versions of the ballet. What we will see here is the "old" one it has danced since 1941, which ends with the "Kingdom of the Shades" scene -- no doomed wedding, no vengeance of the gods, just Solor and his pipe and his ghosts.

Ballerina Diana Vishneva prefers it this way. In a phone interview she said the Shades scene "is like an unfinished conversation, leaving the audience to think about it, without telling them everything in the end."

With its physical and artistic demands, "La Bayadère" has a distinct ability to resculpt a company and a ballerina. The "Shades" scene was first seen in the West in 1961 -- on the Kirov's European tour, the one in which Rudolf Nureyev stunned the world by defecting in Paris. He staged his own version of this scene for the Royal Ballet (a full-length version came years later), with Margot Fonteyn as Nikiya. In her mid-40s, she was shockingly old to be tackling a thorny classical work, but in this ballet her technical and expressive powers gained a force she hadn't possessed in her younger years, and her remarkable status was cemented.

Another Kirov defection, and this time the Americans finally had a "Bayadère": Natalia Makarova fled the company in 1970, and in 1974 staged the "Shades" scene for American Ballet Theatre. Here was a new level of excellence for the company, though Makarova, who spoke little English, brought it about the hard way.

"I had to dance each step myself," she wrote in an e-mail, "to show them what kind of expressive implications each arabesque should have, how one can express through the same basic movement either a thrusting impetus or a majestic quiet."

Two years later, the Shades' entrance was featured memorably in the opening sequence of 1977's Herbert Ross film "The Turning Point," a thinly veiled drama about ABT. For millions of moviegoers, the Shades came to symbolize the art of ballet itself.

Susan Jones was one of those Shades in the film. Now a ballet mistress at ABT, where she is in charge of the corps de ballet, she says she has seen the company grow through performances of "Bayadère." The secret is in training the dancers to breathe together.

"There's a certain bond you experience in the corps," she said. "It spills over and really unites the girls, as a group of women on the same path."

So critical is mental concentration here that the Kirov, like ABT, clears the backstage space of all personnel except the dancers during the Shades scene. No one watches from the wings.

Perhaps Petipa inserted the bit about the opium pipe to foreshadow the breathing that coheres the dancers. At its essence, it's all about inhaling.

"If you want to see unison," said Jones, "go to see the Rockettes. They're brilliant at it. If you want to see individual artists breathe as one, then come to see 'Bayadère.' "