Bolʹshoĭ teatr SSSR. Balet - Bolshoi confidential: secrets of the Russian ballet--from the rule of the tsars to today

O N THE NIGHT of January 17, 2013, Sergey Filin, artistic director of the Bolshoi Theater Ballet, returned to his apartment near the central ring road in Moscow. He parked his black Mercedes outside the building and trudged through the wet falling snow toward the main entrance. His two boys were asleep inside, but he expected that his wife Mariya, herself a dancer, would be waiting up for him. Before he could tap in the security code to open the metal gate, however, a thickset man strode up behind him and shouted a baleful hello. When Filin turned around, the hooded assailant flung a jar of distilled battery acid into his face, then sped off in a waiting car. Filin dropped to the ground and cried for help, rubbing snow into his face and eyes to stop the burning.

The crime threw into chaos one of Russias most illustrious institutions: the Bolshoi Theater, crown jewel during the imperial era, emblem of Soviet power throughout the twentieth century, and showcase for a reborn nation in the twenty-first. Even those performers, greater and lesser, whose careers ended in personal and professional sorrow could justly believe that their lives had been blessed thanks to the stage they had graced. The Bolshois dancers transcended the cracked joints, pulled muscles, and bruised feet that are among the hazards of ballet to exhibit near-perfect poses and unparalleled equipoise. Orphans became angels within the schools that served the theater in the first years of its existence; the Bolshoi then nurtured the great ballet classics of the nineteenth century, and more recently the sheer skill of its dancers has redeemed, at least in part, the ideological dreck of Soviet ballet. The attack on Filin dismantled romantic notions of the art and its artists as ethereal, replacing stories about the breathtaking poetic athleticism on the Bolshoi stage with tales of sex and violence behind the curtainpulp nonfiction. Crime reporters, political and cultural critics, reviewers, and ballet bloggers alike reminded their readers, however, that the theater has often been in turmoil. Rather than an awful aberration, the attack had precedents of sorts in the Bolshois rich and complicated past. That past is one of remarkable achievements interrupted, and even fueled, by periodic bouts of madness.

The history of the Bolshoi travels hand in hand with the history of the nation. As goes Russia, so goes the Bolshoiat least since the Russian Revolution, when the seat of power moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Under the tsars in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg, the Mariyinsky Theater (also known as the Kirov Theater) possessed the most prestige; the city of Moscow and its precariously financed ballet and opera house were considered provincial. But depending on who is looking and from where, one theater, one city, one lineage or another might appear in the foreground of a long tradition. In the twentieth century, the Bolshoi assumed pride of place within Russia and on the international stage as the emissary not only of the Russian ballet tradition but also the Soviet state. Bodies speak in Realpolitik. Russian ballet does not privilege abstraction, and those choreographers who, on limited occasion, sought to create non-narrative, non-subjective works erred in imagining that abstraction could be assigned whatever concepts they desired. Looking at the video records of today and sifting through the archival remains of yesteryear affirm that neither the dance nor the music attached to it is, or ever was, considered pure. Boldness and the projection of power are essential to politics and culture, especially within the context of President Vladimir Putins aggressive nationalist posturing. Today the Bolshoi seeks to regain the preeminence it forfeited after the collapse of the Soviet Union.