© John Ross 'Les Sylphides' reviews 'Scheherazade' reviews 'Les Noces' reviews 'La Bayadere' reviews Zakharova in reviews Ruzimatov in reviews recent Kirov reviews more Jeffery Taylor reviews

With its lime green and peacock blue silks in strange, hallucinatory lighting, not to mention the chiffon just about clinging to the dancing girls, Scheherazade caused an Oriental fashion heat wave in 1910 Paris that has still to cool down.
 

Ballet legend Vaslav Nijinsky's sister, Bronislava, created Les Noces in 1923 when the world was searching for anything new. Bronislava created a primitif, naïve concoction of tableaux and a marionette styled movement in what has become a dance icon. I prefer the Charleston.

Marius Petipa's 1877 La Bayadere was recorded by hand in 1900 and the Kirov bring to London a reconstruction. Basically this means putting back lengthy mime and narrative scenes and rearranging the sequence of some dance set pieces. How illogical and uncomfortable, though, to have very modern and radically developed dancers adopt historic conventions.

But academic quibbles fade when the Kirov dancers take the stage. Andrian Fadeyev is Solor, the Indian Prince who betrays Temple dancer, Nikiya (Daria Pavlenko) in favour of court beauty Gamzatti (Elvira Tarasova). Fadeyev is small and impossibly slim whose natural element is mid-air describing perfect geometric patterns. But for pure classical dancing Pavlenko is to be treasured. Shorn of gymnastics and excessive bravura, her body illuminates the human condition and every move she makes seems to breathe an absolute truth. I think that's called art.