Last post, I wrote about the thrill of seeing the best in the world.  With the Mariinsky Ballet scheduled to appear in Berkeley in La Bayadère, I anticipated that I would be seeing dancers who were among the best in the world.  Because the Mariinsky is one of the great ballet companies.  With all of this in mind, I told a friend, “I expect absolute perfection.”  “Well,” she wrote back, “perfection is tough.”

How right she was!  There were far too many bobbles for me to overlook, or excuse.  I know that there is no such thing as perfection in ballet, and that anyone can have an off night.  But Act II was rife with slips, unbalances, near misses, even a prop malfunction, so many that I was genuinely disappointed.  This was supposed to be an evening of exceptional ballet dancing, and instead I was on the edge of my seat, not in a good way, anxiously hoping the dancers were going to make it through the choreography.

As I have previously established, La Bayadère is not a favorite of mine.  This particular production did nothing to change my mind.  Act I served as a reminder of all the reasons I don’t care for this ballet:  I find it boring and slow moving, with a gesture-heavy plot delivery.  Act II, chock-full of dancing, was a mess.  Finally, with Act III and the iconic Kingdom of the Shades, the company redeemed itself.  The corps shone in the opening of the act, snaking downstage in their arabesques.  The dancing of the soloists and principals was better here, too.

This production follows a different structure than the one I am accustomed to.  The ballet ends with the Kingdom of the Shades, rather than the intended marriage between Solor and Gamzatti and the resulting destruction of the temple.  You leave the theater still under the spell of the Shades, but the plot has fizzled out.

One of the biggest disappointments was the lack of emotional depth in the presentation.  I attended the performance on Saturday night based on my own availability rather than casting, since most of the dancers were unfamiliar to me.  Nikiya and Gamzatti both were danced by young dancers who graduated from the Vaganova Ballet Academy and joined the company only in 2018.  Can you imagine—one moment you’re a student, and the next you’re being asked to command the stage as the lead in a full-length ballet?  Perhaps they’re all so fearless at 18, and eager to be the next star, that it doesn’t phase these dancers.  Phased or not, on Saturday night they were not focused on the performative component.  However, in class the next day, several people raved about the Friday night cast.  I heard they were superb both technically and artistically.  Naturally, I was sorry to have missed that performance—but also heartened to hear that my complaints were not true of the whole run.

The Mariinsky Ballet:  La Bayadère
November 2, 2019, at 8:00 pm at Zellerbach Hall