State Ballet of Georgia: A very mixed bill

(Yuri Possokhov's ballet Sagalobeli, created especially for Nina Ananiashvili's State Ballet of Georgia - the highpoint of an uneven evening. Photo by Lado Vachnadze.)

The program for the Nina Ananiashvili's State Ballet of Georgia performance on Thursday night certainly looked interesting: a triple bill by a classical company with Russian/Soviet pedigree performing an entire program of works choreographed in the last 100 years - two of them entirely new ballets by hot current choreographers? And on tour? A rare event indeed. Ananianshvili is the company's big selling point, both for the audience and as the company's director. The audiences come because of her wonderful reputation as a prima ballerina and our curiosity about her artistic development, and the company gets her connections in the ballet world, through which Ratmansky and Possokhov came.

From what was seen on Thursday, the company is promising, though very green. Ananiashvili's clout has allowed it to work with choreographers like Alexei Ratmansky and San Francisco Ballet's Yuri Possokhov. But this mixed bill evening showed us an energetic company that hasn't fully found its feet yet.

The evening got off to a very, very rough start. Chaconne was not done very well at all, even with Ananiashvili's starry presence in the lead role (she did end up dancing this ballet here - last week she did not in Berkeley). Chaconne can be transcendant when done correctly; set to ballet music from the Gluck opera Orfeo ed Euridice, Balanchine created an abstraction of heavenly spirits dancing amongst the clouds, with flowing white dresses and lyrical strings of steps set to Gluck's music. But the State Ballet of Georgia's dancers were tentative, the deliberateness of their Russian training at complete odds with the effortless musicality required for Balanchine. They didn't look very strong technically either, seeming very unsure of themselves, not completing turns, tripping over feet - and this is not the first time that they have performed this ballet. Ananiashvili herself looked disoriented and off the recorded music, despite her stage experience with Balanchine roles. The recording wasn't helpful; the music was slow and stretched out, taking the wind out of the Gluck score, and it also sounded exceedingly tinny over the spotty amplification. It was one of those dismal performances that practically had me wondering why I bother with classical ballet - it looked irrelevant, frivolously decorative and boring.

Thankfully, things got better - much better - after the intermission. Nin0 Gogua and Lasha Khozashvili danced Balanchine's pas de deux Duo Concertant, an intimate work for two dancers with an on stage pianist and violinist. The music is Stravinsky's five-movement chamber piece for piano and violin of the same name, and the dance is an interplay between the dancers and the on stage musicians. In the first movement, the dancers stand behind the piano and listen intently, then they move center stage to begin dancing in the second movement; they glance back and forth between the musicians and their dancing, simultaneously bouncing off the music and inhabiting it. The ballet's emotional center comes in the adagio section, where the plaintive music is matched by a lyrical duet containing just the faintest hint of a loving partnership. As the female lead, Gogua had a beautiful musical sensitivity, responding with wit and grace to the Stravinsky score. Khozashvili worked wonderfully with Gogua, though lacking her spontaneous response to the music. The flaw in the performance came from the tech crew, during the final movement, the dancers are supposed to be illuminated in isolated columns of light - except that the spotlights couldn't find the dancers and kept squiggling over to the wrong body parts at the wrong times. But still, it was such a relief to see good dancing at this point in the evening. The live musicians on stage helped a lot too, I think that the dancers more naturally responded to the music being created there with them, especially played as well as it was by Liam Viney and Roberto Cani, piano and violin respectively.

After a short pause, we saw Ratmansky's Bizet Variations, a new ballet created for the company. Though danced with conviction by six dancers, including Ananiashvili, this ballet and last week's new Pierrot Lunaire for Diana Vishneva haven't done much to showcase why Ratmansky is such an in-demand choreographer in the classical world. Set to Georges Bizet piano variations (played with amplification by two offstage pianists), the choreography ambled along with the music, couples dancing in an abstract ballroom of sorts. This piece had more structure and form than Pierrot, as well as the suggestion of a story when the two dancers of a couple exited the stage at opposite ends, staring across with significant looks. But there was sameness and a slavish literalness to the music. Ratmansky revealed nothing about the music, nor revealed his own movement ideas to develop. Consquently, the dancing was a bore after about two minutes. Still, it was better danced than Chaconne, so there is that.

The evening's highpoint came at the end, with Yuri Possokhov's Sagalobeli, another ballet created for the company. Possokhov was a former dancer with the Bolshoi before moving to San Francisco Ballet for the later part of his dancing and choreographic career. Sagalobeli is set to Georgian folk music, and unlike Ratmansky's choreography, Possokhov seems to have something to say in the movement. The dancing doesn't merely accompany the music, but rather forms its own statement in addition to it - the dancing is just as interesting as the music, not a second class citizen. Though not entirely original (parts of Sagobeli resemble Nacho Duato on pointe), Possokhov created interesting patterns on the stage, and develops solos and pas de deux like he is telling a story in choreography - not a literal story, but the steps develop from one point to another. The choreography contains many of the quirks that I've seen his previous works on San Francisco Ballet, like choreographed falls and rolls on the floor and spectacular lifts in the pas de deux. Sagobeli is nevertheless a very attractive piece, fine tuned to the strengths of the ensemble of dancers, who danced it very well.

The company dances Giselle over the weekend, a Romantic classic in a style that the company is much more familiar with (more so than Chaconne, certainly). Ananiashvili dances the title role on Saturday night, a role she is famous for, so that should be interesting to see. It will likely be one of the last chances to see her in the role now that she is nearing her retirement from the stage.

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Alastair Macauley's New York Times review of Diana Vishneva's Beauty in Motion includes several spectacular pictures by Richard Termine. Take a look. Interestingly, Macauley found Ratmansky's Pierrot "by far the program’s most complex and rewarding work in terms of sheer dance." I had a very different reaction, but as I said last week, New York may have seen a very different ballet from what we saw in Orange County on opening night.

Also, thank you to Out West Arts, who linked here in his post today (a fellow LA artsgoer, he has much more informed things to say about opera and classical music than I do, so read there too!). He saw Diana Szeinblum's Alaska at REDCAT on Thursday, another one of the many very interesting dance performances taking place around Southern California this weekend. It seems that with many things performing arts-related in LA, it all happens at once!