O.K.!

With Manhattan at their dancing feet, 90 remarkable Russians launched a seven-week campaign this week to sweep through eleven other U.S. and Canadian cities across the continent. The invaders: Moscow's phenomenal Moiseyev Dance Company (TIME, April 14). Every night for three weeks the standees jostled four deep behind the Metropolitan Opera's ropes, and even the ushers stared popeyed at the stage. Orchestra seats went on the black market for $80 a pair, but few could be had. Night after night, audiences (total: 79,000, who paid $365,000) rose in cheering ovations. Impresario Sol Hurok promptly scheduled four extra performances in Madison Square Garden in late June--and they are already sold out.

What did the kids (average age: 23) have? Most obviously, boundless energy, meshed-gear precision, dramatic flair, sheer physical virtuosity. In superbly mounted national folk dances and "popular ballets" (original works on contemporary Russian themes), the men soared above the stage in spring-legged leaps that seemed to pin them in the air as if frozen by a strobe light, whipped their bodies into angles few Western dancers would even attempt. In Polyanka (The Meadow), files of dancers snaked across the stage in a sinuous blur of speed, hurled past one another in a complex tracery. Partisans had the black-cloaked dancers gliding in roller-smooth imitation of horsemen on patrol; Soccer sent them cartwheeling in comic, splay-fingered lunges for an imaginary ball.

Masculine Males. What perhaps warmed U.S. audiences most was the robust, open humor and friendliness, the sunny exuberance that blew through the whole performance. The full-bodied Russian girls were ingenuously sensuous without being sensual. The men--possibly the most masculine male dancers ever to kick a leg in Manhattan--performed their muscle-twisting feats witha pure animal joy of movement rarely seen on the stage. Wrote Critic Harold Clurman: "The qualities these dancers possess are those we [Americans] like to claim as our own when we feel ourselves to be at our best.''

Manhattan's love affair with the Moiseyev--running concurrently with Moscow's crush on U.S. Pianist Van Cliburn (TIME April 21-28)--went on offstage too. Every time the dancers left their Times Square hotel (where they insisted on making their own beds), they were followed by curious throngs, snapped by photographers, interviewed by newsmen. The girls went on Fifth Avenue shopping sprees, passed opinions about the chemise ("all right for the not too fat"), Americans ("very friendly"), Manhattan ("too noisy"), the Broadway musical West Side Story ("too sexy"). When the dancers visited Harlem, they were amazed to find broad streets where they had expected to find "oppressed classes" living in shacks. The stoutly Republican New York Herald Tribune, learning that blonde Dancer Lydia Skriabina cherished but could not afford a $5 mechanical bear, sent a reporter dashing out to buy it and present it to her.

Leaps to Rock. After attending a matinee of West Side Story, the whole company paid an onstage visit to the cast, soon began communicating in a spontaneous contest of dance leaps and turns. When the Russians outleaped and outturned them, the West Siders took refuge in a whirl of rock 'n' roll. To their astonishment, the Muscovites went right into rock 'n' roll too. The Russians also went downtown to Michael Herman's Folk Dance House, studiously followed a caller through the intricacies of such American classics as Kentucky Mountain Running Set, Paw Paw Patch, Beaux of Oak Hill. At their final Metropolitan appearance before leaving for this week's engagement in Montreal, they surprised and delighted their audience with a spirited rendition of the Virginia reel to the tune of Turkey in the Straw, then "la-la-laed" through a chorus of Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here and bade farewell with shouts of the word that echoed Manhattan's verdict: "O.K.!"

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