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Her reading of Odette is lyrical and fluid. There is a sense of perpetual motion, whether it be in the fluttering of a finger, the unfolding of an arm, a quivering of the back, a twitch of the head - and it carries with it a great feeling of dramatic un-ease and not, I hasten to add, in a bad way. This Odette feels no stillness because hers is not a soul at rest - this is a human queen trapped in the body of a swan, wrestling, writhing, desperate to get out. Her body follows the musical phrases of the Tchaikovsky as if she herself were a musician playing the score and this fluidity in her dance captures the inner torment of Odette's soul brilliantly. And then there are her eyes: large, deep and mournful they howl even to the back of the amphitheatre with desperate and agonised cries for help.

Now compare that to her Odile, which is the complete physical antithesis of her Odette - so much so, in fact, that it takes you a couple of seconds to convince yourself that there has not been an unannounced substitution during the first interval. But there hasn't - those unique eyes tell you it is she and if you are still in doubt just look at those legs, which are surely two of the most beautiful in the business. She has a sharp and dazzling technique, which she uses to the full. She holds her attitudes and her arabesques just that nanosecond longer, forcing you to stare in wonder at her and in doing so ensnaring the audience into her web of malevolence and deceit. Just as in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte the Queen of the Night tricks Prince Tamino with her dramatic coloratura, so too does this Odile trick Prince Siegfried with her array of artifice, culminating of course in Pierina Legnani's 32 Fouettés (damn her).

And then we are back to the lake and the so-called "Soviet Happy Ending" and a stage bathed in the morning sun. With von Rothbart lying wingless and dead on the floor, the spell is lifted, the swans become human again. And now watch Pavlenko, as she looks down at her hand discovering that fingers are there and that humanity and femininity have been returned to her. See that dawning of a life renewed. It all makes sense and I love it.
 

I should like to write more, to tell you about the wonderful Vasily Scherbakov in the Pas de Trois, the beautiful swans of Daira Sukhoruva and Xenia Ostreikovskaya, the four perfect cygnets (Ivanova, Obraztsova, Vasyukovich, Chiml) and Igor Kolb's majestic partnering (and his wonderfully melancholic Act 1 solo), but I cannot. Words are spent and I am drained. I have written too excessively over the last four days, but if you take one sentence from my four postings let it be this - that the Kirov is a phenomenon, a true Wonder of the Dance World.