Sadler's Wells
10 - 13 February 2003

Imagine a dance tradition famous for its rigour and purity, its classical exactness, its weddedness to exquisitely proud line and movement, and its great tradition. Imagine a young adventurous choreographer, wishing he could move that tradition onwards, yet cut off from developments in dance elsewhere in the world, relying on his own resources of imagination and creativity to extend the vocabulary of his tradition, seeking to modernise it and to evolve its repertoire. Well: something almost exactly like this happened when, from the mid-1970s, Boris Eifman began trying to push ballet onwards in Russia, working from the country's majestic classical tradition towards new forms of expression. He did it alone, without the example and the inspiration of the talent and ideas that were burgeoning in the Western world of dance world.
      Here on the stage of Sadler's Wells one sees the result: the high language of Russian ballet spoken with a new inflection, a modified accent, taking the essential standard shapes of the tradition and stretching and remodelling them, but never arbitrarily or without sensitivity. By these careful means Eifman achieves real expressive power in the new shapes he finds, and with it an equally carefully maintained sense of the greatest objective of Russian dance: the preservation and promotion of beauty.
      Eifman has a marvellous company of dancers to work with. They dance the pure Russian style, whose Eifman-evolved contemporary inflection seems utterly natural to them. The principal dancers are stunningly good: Vera Arbuzova, Yuri Ananyan and Albert Galichanin would grace any stage in any capital of the world. Arbuzova seems to have been designed by a team of dance deities specifically for existence as a ballerina; effortless and graceful in a long, taxing part, there is never a moment when she does not hold the audience's attention absolutely.
      Red Giselle is the dance-told story of the ballerina Olga Spessivtseva (1895 - 1991). It is a moving tale of an artist whose genius at one time made people say that she performed Giselle even better than did Pavlova. After a glittering career, paralleled by a private life filled with much emotional wretchedness, she became exiled to the United States by the threat and then the actuality of war in the late 1930s. In 1940 she had a mental breakdown, and languished for many decades in an asylum, where no-one knew of her past. Not long before her death at the age of 96 she was found and moved to the Tolstoy Farm in Valley Cottage, New York, where she had a last moment of recognition and contenment.
      Eifman's retelling focuses on the point in Spessivtseva's career when the Revolution brought her into contact with a KGB agent with whom she has a torrid and tortured affair, interfering with her development as a dancer and in time forcing her to flee to Paris. There she again danced Giselle, but suffered homesickness and nightmares about her past in Russia, and also an unrequited love for her chief dance partner at the Opera Garnier. Eifman's aim is to recapitulate Spessivtseva's story by analogy with Giselle's - its love, betrayal and madness being the common fate of both.
      Two kinds of love are central to the story: the dark, brutal, sinister obsession between the dancer and the KGB operative, in which she lies helplessly in his emotional thrall, and the yearning, unconsummatable passion of the dancer for her principal stage partner, in which she lies helplessly outside his ability to respond to her need for him, even though he pities her; for as the story expressly tells us, he is gay.
      Vera Arbuzova and the choreography of Boris Eifman are the stars of a piece of dance theatre which, in its every essential - from the choice of music to each member of a brilliant troupe - is unmissably good.
AC Grayling