© Video Artists International This DVD is avilable from: DanceBooks Amazon Bolshoi 'Trapeze' reviews 'Trapeze' reviews? recent Bolshoi reviews Charlotte Kasner reviews

Rather surprisingly, the unprepossessing packaging for this DVD bears only a single, and strangely incongruous, image: this being the close-up of a necklace on its front cover. There’s not a single photo of any of the remarkable dancers featured on the disc within. In fact, it’s odd that the blurb does not proclaim in great big Capitals that this DVD is a significant tribute to two of the greatest dancers to grace the Bolshoi in the later part of the twentieth century: Vladimir Vasiliev and Ekaterina Maximova, life partners on-and-off the stage. A photograph of them both on the cover would have been a start.

Vasiliev and Maximova were born within a year of each other in Moscow at around the time that WWII began; they both graduated into the Bolshoi in 1958, jointly winning Gold Medals at Varna in 1964; they towered over the company for fully 20 years before being effectively banished in the late 80s. Vasiliev, of course, eventually returned and succeeded Yuri Grigorovich as artistic director for a brief period at the end of the Millennium.

This DVD captures their entwined career at both ends of the spectrum, beginning with ‘Trapeze’, filmed in 1970 at the height of their virtuoso powers, and moving on to ‘Fragments of a Biography’, made for Soviet TV in 1985. Here, Vasiliev is no longer the ‘living missile’ or ‘human torpedo’, as he had been described when the Bolshoi appeared at the Royal Festival Hall twenty years previously: at 45, some of the former vigour and athleticism had understandably waned, but the strength, precision and dramatic intensity remains wholly intact.

‘Trapeze’ is a relatively slight work, most notable for its early Prokoviev score (commissioned in 1924 for a small Parisian dance troupe with scant funds, so made for a quintet). Maximova plays a young girl who enters the world of a circus and eventually supplants the envious older ballerina (Ludmilla Vlasova) as the trapeze artist. Vasiliev stars as the clown and Natalia Ryzhenko’s choreography gives him full vent to live up to the ‘human torpedo’ tag. The acrobatics are stunning: one-handed tumbles, incredibly fast pirouettes and a set of multiple spins straight into box split, which seems years ahead of its time in the range of movement. When the Harlequin (Boris Baranovski) spins across the lens, there seems little doubt that the effect is maximised by the film’s speed being accelerated; but the same artificiality never appears to have enhanced Vasiliev’s virtuosity.

The action takes place in a fantasy circus arena, which looks cleverly like a cartoon set within which the human figures appear. The backdrop of huge, triangular, elongated apartment blocks gives the film a Parisian or Roman feel: it has been described as “Fellini-esque” and I can see why; it certainly seems as if it could have been filmed at CinneCitta but perhaps five or ten years earlier.
 

© Video Artists International

One interesting side issue of ‘Trapeze’ is that it was co-directed by Victor Smirnov-Golovanov, who appears in the ballet (as plain Victor Smirnov) in a comic cameo as the circus strongman. Perhaps more than any other, this man has brought contemporary Russian ballet to the widest audiences in the UK, as the founder and artistic director of the Moscow City Ballet which has toured the country extensively over the past 20 years.

‘Fragments of a Biography’ is Vasiliev’s own work, directed and choreographed in a television studio, and danced passionately to a cocktail of Argentine music. It is described as a ‘memory ballet’, in which Vasiliev is filmed looking pensively into a mirror before each of the nine fragments of choreography which comprise his past life. Maximova is the ‘Woman in White’ who appears to Vasiliev as an angelic apparition walking on a cloud, which suggested to me that she was the deceased love of his life (but the DVD blurb says that she is an abstract distillation of all his long lost loves).

Fitting my imaginary concept of this as a tribute DVD to the couple, the best episodes are the four fragments in which Vasiliev and Maximova dance together, illustrating two bodies in perfect accord as befits over 25 years of working and living together. In particular, her technique – especially on pointe – is awesome and the striking pliability, for which her career was noted, appears undiminished. But ‘Fragments of a Biography’ also features eight other Bolshoi dancers in Vasiliev’s flashbacks, mostly in a series of exquisite duets, including the astonishingly youthful Nina Timofeyeva (who is, incredibly, 50 years old at the time this film was made), and both Andris Liepa and Alexei Fadeyechev, both in the very early stages of their Bolshoi careers.

To complete the “Tribute to…” scenario, the disc also features a five minute bonus of excerpts from Maximova’s solos in Vasiliev’s ballet, ‘Anyuta’ (filmed in 1982). It’s a final punctuation mark on a very good argument to buy the DVD. The special effects are often very dated (and even a little irritating) and the lighting is sometimes poor; but these rare examples of the outrageously brilliant techniques of Vasiliev and Maximova, captured forever in modern Russian ballets which are not well-known in the west, are absolutely priceless.