Ballerina Assoluta

As Giselle, the famous role that she danced for the first time 27 years ago, Galina Sergeyevna Ulanova last week at the Metropolitan Opera House showed why, at 49, she is the world's greatest ballerina. Even to an audience already keyed to a series of Bolshoi successes, the evening was a triumph--and Ulanova's performance a genuine masterpiece of the theater.

Ulanova displayed a mastery so complete that technique itself seemed to disappear, letting emotion flood the stage. In the first act Ulanova was a shy girl, trembling with anguish and expectation on the edge of maturity. In a remarkable series of movements, expressions and gestures, she mimed her unfolding first love, with its joys and terrors wavering through her like a fever. At first as tremulous in her movements as a butterfly fluttering from a chrysalis, she broadened her movements as the act progressed into ardently flowing figures that beautifully and simply evoked her stirring feelings. After her betrayal, in the moments of madness before her death, her motions were brittle, her face grown suddenly old. The second act, in which Giselle emerged as a ghostly Wili from her tomb to dance once more with her love, gave Ulanova the opportunity to display the wonderful floating motions that sometimes seem to have her drifting soft as eiderdown before an unfelt breeze. In the presence of a performance as great as Ulanova's, perhaps the chief wonder of the evening was that the rest of the company managed to shine with a brilliance all their own.

Ulanova does not have the biggest mass following in Russia: younger fans prefer 32-year-old Maya Plisetskaya (TIME, May 4). But Ulanova is the most revered Russian dancer (perhaps the most revered Russian artist in any field), and was even before she moved to the Bolshoi Company in 1944. Born in St. Petersburg in 1910, she was introduced to the dance early: her father, Sergei Ulanov, was a member of the corps at the famed Mariinsky (now Kirov) Theater, and her mother, Maria Romanova, a Mariinsky soloist and teacher at the St. Petersburg Ballet School. At first Galina had no desire to dance, and she recalls "crying bitterly with fear" when she was first taken to the Mariinsky school when she was 9. Her father, Galina recalls, had wanted a boy, and since there were no other children in the family, she went with him on hunting and fishing trips, wore her hair cropped and "learned to use hammer and saw as well as any handyman."

By the time she was ten she was dancing tiny roles. At 18 she joined the Leningrad Ballet and remained there until she was called to the Bolshoi. Now nearing the end of her career, she concentrates on three full-length roles--Juliet, Giselle and Maria (in The Fountain of Bakhchisarai).

She appears at the Bolshoi Theater not more than three times a month but invariably packs the house with VIPs when she does. Married to Vadim Rindin, chief designer of the Bolshoi, she lives in a four-room apartment on the ninth floor of a building overlooking the Moscow River and the Kremlin. Although she earns an estimated $25,000 a year as leading ballerina of the Bolshoi, she maintains no country dacha, but drives a six-cylinder Volga, which she hopes to turn in someday for a larger car ("I dream," she says, "about its automatic shift").

An inordinately shy woman, Ulanova attends few official receptions, mixes rarely with other dancers. Her life for 40 years has been entwined with ballet's creatures of fancy. When she is preparing for a performance, she likes to retire to the Bolshoi Theater dacha outside Moscow and sit under the birch trees reading a large, leatherbound volume of Shakespeare. The scene seems to have come direct from the mistily romantic world she evokes better than any living ballerina.

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