Dancing That Counts

"I could never follow the story of Raymonda,'" complained Prince Peter Lieven, after seeing the Marius Petipa-Alexander Glazunov ballet, which was premiered at St. Petersburg's Maryin-sky Theater in 1898.

Raymonda, as revised and presented last week by Leningrad's Kirov Ballet at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, makes no more sense. There's still the wicked Saracen and the noble Hungarian knight named Jean de Brienne, a duel, an attempted abduction, a wed ding, Spanish and Moorish dances, and of course the maiden Raymonda herself.

But the absence of a plot is no disaster. Raymonda becomes a series of exquisitely varied, buoyantly assertive dances that cascade at staccato pace across the stage, and after all it is the dancing that counts.

Impressionistic sets convey the mood of weightlessness and airiness suggested by Glazunov's pastel-colored music. Raymonda's feather-light leaps and soaring turns keep the heroine airborne for the better part of the performance. Raymonda is among the most difficult roles in Russian ballet, and it was rendered with elegance, grace and precision in two successive New York performances by Irina Kolpakova and Kaleria Fedicheva. Jean de Brienne, portrayed in both performances by Vladilen Semenov, Kolpakova's real-life husband, spends most of the time as Raymonda's elevator man.

The Kirov, launching a three-month tour of U.S. and Canadian cities, also offers a gay version of Cinderella, which is tricked out with international dances by the simple device of making the prince search for his ashy love all over the world. The Kirov versions of Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty are impeccable, if cold. All the principal dancers are technically irreproachable. If they lack the idiosyncrasies that make great stars out of merely superb dancers, at least there is the consoling virtue that it does not matter much, except to close students of the dance, which ballerina is seen in any particular performance. And no U.S. company, lacking the Government subsidy that makes Russian ballet the most pampered of proletarian arts, can provide the costuming and scenery that creates the magical illusion of that not-now-and-never-was world, where the lovely princess does not spend her honeymoon water-skiing but soars to the sky on seemingly gossamer wings--with no political complications whatever.

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