A Swan Song for Ballerina

Theater has "Hamlet." Classical music has Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. And ballet? "Swan Lake." The pinnacle of the classical ballet repertory, "Swan Lake" presents one of the art form's ultimate challenges: the ballerina's dual role of the Swan Queen Odette and her bewitched evil pretender, Odile.

American Ballet Theatre's staging of the 1895 ballet by Marius Petipa opens next week at the Kennedy Center Opera House (the company is also presenting a mixed-repertory program), and four distinctive ballerinas will take on the role: Veronika Part, Gillian Murphy, Michele Wiles and the elegant Russian ballerina Nina Ananiashvili, who bids farewell to American Ballet Theatre at this season's end. It will be Ananiashvili's final Kennedy Center performance as an ABT company member. (She dances "Swan Lake" the evening of Feb. 21.)

"Of course it's so sad for me to say goodbye to ABT because I love this company . . . and I will miss it," Ananiashvili said recently from her native home of Tbilisi, Georgia, where she is directing the State Ballet of Georgia on invitation from Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. "I have a very good memory of Washington, D.C., and I love to be back at the Kennedy Center, even if for a short visit, but it will be important."

Ananiashvili, 45, danced her first Odette/Odile in 1983 with the Bolshoi Ballet, while she was a member of the corps de ballet. "I danced it quite accidentally because the Bolshoi was touring Germany and some ballerina was sick. [Yuri] Grigorivich, the director of the Bolshoi, decided to give me this role, which I had never danced before." Ananiashvili had just two days to learn the grueling part before a two-day train journey to Hamburg. "That was my first big success," she says with understatement. "Of course, I never performed this before. It was just my first year with the Bolshoi. I was really young -- 18 or 19."

What Ananiashvili doesn't say is that for many ballerinas, developing both the technique and the acting chops to pull off "Swan Lake" takes years of coaching and hard work. She finessed it in a weekend.

She admits: "This role is really difficult, and not just technically. This role is difficult because you need to play two roles, Odette and Odile. You need to play both stories. And at the same time you need to be perfect in technique. A lot of people danced this role, but very few people stay in memory.

"First there is Odette, a girl who became a swan because of an evil [sorcerer] in this old story. You need to dance this character really sad. On your face you need to show the story of this sad swan and how you're afraid of love, because in the story, if love is not true, Odette will die or stay her life as a swan. In the third act, when this [sorcerer] makes his daughter to look like Odette, you must dance differently. You need to have totally different character. You are evil, you are pretty woman, but at the same time you know how you need to take the attention of the prince."

What Ananiashvili says she has found most challenging over the years is making both the pure beauty of the white swan, Odette, and the passionate trickery of the black swan, Odile, her own. "You need to find something that doesn't look like everybody else's 'Swan Lake,' " she says. "Now, because I've danced this part a lot, I think I can look back and believe that somehow I found my 'Swan Lake' that is really different from the others. I cannot explain what that is and I cannot say mine [is] better, but mine is different."

And as Ananiashvili winds down her career with ABT, it's her first "Swan Lake" that she remembers as changing her life. "After my first time with 'Swan Lake,' everybody called me a ballerina and I became 'Swan Lake.' "

American Ballet Theatre Kennedy Center Opera House, 2700 F St. NW. 202-467-4600 or 800-444-1324. http://www.kennedy-center.org. Tuesday-Feb. 22. $29-$85.