Tchaikovsky Perm Ballet's refreshing Swan Lake

(At the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza on Friday. Photo: me)

All I could think of while watching the Tchaikovsky Perm Ballet's Swan Lake in Thousand Oaks was that it was all so refreshing. It was a basic Swan Lake, with the traditional plot told in a fairly straightforward, albeit Russian, manner, but nevertheless without extra interpolations or layers of tortured psychology. The dancing was bright and airy, with easy, fluid motion and buoyancy. And even though this company is hardly world famous, and even though this scrappy touring production of Swan Lake is traveling the country doing one-night stands in mostly second class presenting houses (their Berkeley engagement the notable exception), I found it very refreshing because it was such a marked - better - contrast to the pallidness of American Ballet Theatre's Swan Lake at the Music Center last weekend.

This Russian company, from the city of Perm near the Ural mountains, is usually considered the third of the Russian classical troupes, behind the much more famous Kirov/Mariinsky and Bolshoi troupes, but nevertheless the schooling is characteristically Russian in form and strength. The bodies hew more closely to those of Kirov dancers, as during World War II, the Kirov company decamped to Perm during the siege of St. Petersburg. After the war, the Kirov left behind training styles and strong standards that the Perm company more or less keeps with its own troupe to the present day.

While the Kirov frequently tours the West with big flashy engagements at flagship venues like the Royal Opera House, the Kennedy Center, or, locally, at the Orange County Performing Arts Center and the Music Center, the Perm company occasionally tours the United States to much smaller theaters in suburban areas - and under varying different names. They were last here several years ago as the Perm State Ballet, performing Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty at the Cerritos Center, and before that, they toured with Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet. They have always been a nice, solid company, if not as glamorous and internationally renowned as the Kirov.

On the other hand, American Ballet Theatre frequently arrives in town with a marketing and press machine that trumps itself as the country's finest, "America's national ballet company," they call themselves. On tour to London last year, the company and its presenters justified astronomical ticket prices as "worth it" for a company of its international standards and reputation. But if it is a company of such high standards, then what was with the sloppy show they put on last week, especially compared to the Perm's much more strongly danced and coherent Swan. (I realize I was very nice to ABT in my reviews last week... large scale classical ballet is so few and far between in Southern California that whenever it arrives, I'm much more forgiving. I should have called the company out on its limpid production and half-hearted dancing. Seriously: unpointed feet, national dances that looked like everyone was sleepwalking in America's national company? Was it a bad week for them, were they tired from touring? Does that matter? Tickets cost upwards of $100.)

Anyway... back to Friday night, like I said the Perm Ballet's Swan was a nice, clean, standard Swan Lake. The physical production was decidedly dumpy with wrinkly backdrops, but the simple settings worked; the costumes were standard traditional - basic white tutus in the lake scene, courtly dress in the others (well, except for the princess escorts in Act 3, who oddly looked like escapees from the Lord of the Rings films with their crazy elvish hair wigs).

This production of Swan Lake is not the one that the Perm Ballet toured with last time, rather, it is relatively new to the company. They performed it on their last tour of America in 2006, skipping So Cal but passing through Berkeley and cities on the East Coast, where the New York Times reviewed them). Staged by Natalia Makarova, the production takes its choreographic text for the Act 2 lakeside scene from the Kirov's Konstantin Sergeyev production - it's mostly the same Ivanov choreography that everyone uses, but with a few differences in the swan corps dances and, most notably, no mime passages for storytelling (Soviet cultural comisars reportedly nixed mime in story ballets, in Swan Lake there is a lot of arabesquing and arm flapping instead). The waltzes and other details in Acts 1 and 3 are presumably Makarova's own choreography, and the Act 4 lakeside dances are reportedly by Frederick Ashton, pulled from Makarova's previous stagings of the ballet, and also from the productions that she danced when she guested at the Royal Ballet as a dancer. Ashton's delightful Pas de Quatre, reportedly used on the company's last tour, was not present in Thousand Oaks.

The evening's most satisfying element was the corps, which moved with a unified sense of style and also danced with, for lack of a better description, a full sense of confidence in its ability to dance. No fussiness or half-heartedness here when plunging into a large arabesque or jumping into an expansive sissone (this shouldn't be impressive for a professional company, but it is when ABT didn't dance this way last week). The national dances - categorized as character dances in classical ballets - actually had character to them, danced like they were an integral part of the ballet, not filler before the Black Swan Pas de Deux.

Natalia Moiseyeva danced Odette/Odile. There was a soft, very sensitive and solid reading of the role - a gorgeous, soft adage in the Act 2 white act, balanced with a technically dazzling black swan in Act 3. Just a strong, standard Odette/Odile all around (not unbalanced and unpredictable Michele Wiles' last Thursday). Her Siegfried, whose name I did not catch in the casting announced over the loudspeakers - no cast list in the program - was the typical of Russian production Siegfrieds: a stable partner, but fading into the background in deference to the ballerina.

It was just a solid, good Swan Lake. And though the performance won't go down as an outright distinctive one (that honor would go to Diana Vishneva's or Marianela Nunez's Swans), it was good to see the ballet done decently well, restoring my fond memories of it.