The Panovs at Last

By Joan Downs

For years Valery Panov was the premier dancer in Russia. His wife Galina was a ballerina of exhilarating potential. Then, in March of 1972, Panov, who is a Jew, and Galina, who is not, applied for permission to emigrate to Israel. Refusal was accompanied by stunning repercussions: Panov's dismissal from Leningrad's Kirov Ballet, his wife's ignominious demotion, and subsequent denial of the couple's right to dance at all.

Life became a minute-by-minute ordeal of persecution, torture and imprisonment that stirred world indignation. In the many months that followed, the Panovs emerged as a symbol of oppressed Soviet Jewry. Last summer, finally allowed to enter Israel, they began the delicate process of recovering their art.

Last week in Philadelphia, the Panovs presented their visiting card to the Western Hemisphere. Dance buffs looked forward to the couple's debut with foreboding as well as anticipation. Two years' enforced idleness could have seriously impaired 25-year-old Galina's abilities. For Valery, 36, it might have meant physical deterioration. The big question was: Can the Panovs still dance well? The answer was a resounding yes.

They got off to a shaky start.

As an arena for hockey games and rock concerts, Philadelphia's 19,500-seat Spectrum is attractive and ample. As a setting for a ballet performance, it provided a frenzy of flashing lights, hissing loudspeakers and cloudbursts of balloons that resembled nothing quite so much as Busby Berkeley's lampoon of a dancer's nightmare.

At one end of the auditorium, the Panovs performed on a small, bare platform. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra played on a raised stage behind them, causing Conductor Robert Zeller to cast uneasy glances across his shoulder to check music-dance synchronization. Temporarily blinded by a megawatt supertrooper rock-show spotlight, Galina lost sight of her husband and missed a lift during the grand pas de deux from The Nutcracker. " 'Where are you, Valery?' I cried to myself," she said later. However, in The Lady and the Hooligan, a Shostakovich ballet, Galina's feathery pirouettes and Panov's dramatic aerial twists and one-knee landings were expressed in sharp balletic syntax.

Their dancing continued to gain in strength and grace. By the time they arrived at the showy display of Riccardo Drigo's Harlequinade, Panov's springy jete and Galina's whirlwind fouettes (whipping one-leg turns) were evidence enough that for them the two years had been stopped time, not lost time.

Right now Galina is overshadowed by her husband's mature artistry. It was Panov the dancing actor rather than Panov the spectacular technician who stole the evening. As Petrouchka in Stravinsky's tragicomedy celebrating the Russian Punch, Panov combined Chaplinesque humor with a mime's mastery of the mysterious language of silence. A floppy puppet holding his heart and crying real tears, Panov shrugged his shoulders and, with a spineless collapse, fell to the floor in a human puddle. In that single movement he captured all the joy and anguish of the universal clown.

Joan Downs

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