Old Ballets, Soviet Style

Communist Russia has always been a proud patron of the ballet, possibly because one of the Bolshevik Revolution's opening oratorical guns was fired from a ballerina's love nest.

When Lenin returned to St. Petersburg on April 16, 1917 from his ten-year exile, he was escorted, amid armored cars, red flags and circling searchlights, to a chic town house. There, speaking to the crowd from a second-story balcony, he proclaimed the start of worldwide revolution. Before it became Bolshevik headquarters, that villa had been occupied by Mathilde Kchessinska, once Czar Nicholas II's great & good friend, certainly one of the best dancers of all time and one of two ever to bear the lofty title of prima ballerina assoluta.* In Berlin last week, another ballerina was given that title by sentimental oldtimers: Galina Ulanova, 44, the darling of the Soviet Ballet.

Burnooses & Spies. When East Berlin turned out to welcome the Soviet troupe after its scheduled Paris appearance had been canceled (TIME, May 24), there was at least as much oratory and red-flagwaving as on that day in St. Petersburg. East Berlin's Friedrichstadt Palast theater was jammed to capacity (3,000) with German Communist dignitaries, workers' delegations, burnoosed and turbaned diplomats from a Red peace conference. Also present in the audience: quite a few esthetic spies from the West zone, eager for their first look at a full Soviet troupe.

The huge opening-night program featured no fewer than 13 separate items, from brief solo dances and pas de deux to the whole third act from Romeo and Juliet. For Western tastes, the costumes were both overly lavish and tacky (although the ballerinas are usually sewn into them), and the sets seemed stodgy. But the dancing was just about as good as legend had it.

Gymnastics & Glides. Leading Berlin ballet critics gave TIME this estimate: The corps is equal in precision and grace to any in the West. The male dancers are strong and athletic, but they are rarely graceful and are seldom soloists. Among the ballerinas, Galina Ulanova is not absolutely assoluta. When on pointes, she moves so delicately that she seems to glide, but Ulanova indulges in plenty of cape-swishing and distraught breast-beating. When she sticks to her own soft type of dance movement, she is superb. In classical technique, she is as good as the best U.S. ballerinas, if not quite up to England's Margot Fonteyn.

The company as a whole is excellent in classical numbers, though Sadler's Wells does most of them better. In their modern productions, the Russians show that they live in another world. In these pieces, their choreography is heavy, full of gymnastics and without imagination.

* Only other to hold this internationally respected rank handed out by the Russian Imperial Ballet--and unused in the Soviet Union today--was Italy's Pierina Legnani, who startled the Russians with her famous 32 fouettes (whipping turns) in 1893. She died in 1923. Kchessinska, 81, still lives in Paris, with her husband, the Grand Duke Andre, 75. The Duke does the daily shopping while the Absolute Ballerina gives ballet lessons and does a little polite gambling on the side.

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