Ivan Is Terrible

By John T. Elson

Moscow's massive Bolshoi Ballet approaches the great classics of dance--Swan Lake, for example, or Giselle--as if they were museum pieces on the move, as many of them are. The Russians' excessive awe of tradition can be a hindrance when it comes to creating new choreography. A striking case in point is Yuri Grigorovich's Ivan the Terrible, which was given its American premiere at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House last week by a large touring company of the Bolshoi. Grigorovich is probably the Soviet Union's finest classical choreographer, and the two-act ballet is his first original work for the Bolshoi in nearly seven years. Yet Ivan is, well, terrible.

Like Sergei Eisenstein's film classic--the score is based largely on Prokofiev's music for that movie--the ballet is an episodic, ponderously romanticized narrative about Czar Ivan IV. A madman and a tyrant, Ivan fought the feudal boyar nobles as well as invading enemies and managed to unite Russia during the 16th century. There are scenes evoking his struggle with the nobles, lyrical moments of happiness with his first wife, Anastasia, plotting by the boyars and the duplicitous Prince Kurbsky, who tries to destroy Ivan by poisoning his queen. After her death, the Czar's madness grows, and with it his use of the dreaded oprichniki (a primitive kind of secret police) to suppress both boyar and peasant revolts. Ivan's Stalinoid cruelties have always represented something of an ideological embarrassment to the Kremlin. Grigorovich, in a program note, argues unconvincingly that the real heroes of the ballet are the Russian people, "who withstood all the ordeals, survived and emerged victorious."

Beyond Caricature. In fact, the real heroes are the Bolshoi dancers, who survive Grigorovich's overly athletic, cliche-ridden choreography with amazing elan. The crowd scenes, whether they involve battles, conspiring boyars or rebellious peasants, are confused and repetitive, and pale in excitement by comparison with the kind of dashing maneuvers performed by Russia's folkish Moiseyev company. Every grimace and gesture seems aimed broadly at viewers in the last row of the top balcony. Naturally, the boyars are evil beyond the point of caricature; the peasants are simple and good.

As Anastasia, Natalia Bessmertnova--one of the most lyrical ballerinas in the world--has little to do but flutter her graceful arms and look demure. The only multidimensional character is Ivan, a role danced at the premiere by Yuri Vladimirov. An extraordinarily lithe actor with a frazzled mane and long simian arms, Vladimirov in his mad scenes looked oddly like a bemused orangutan who had suddenly been set loose from a zoo. That effect was heightened in the ballet's unintentionally ludicrous climax, when the paranoid Czar, hopelessly entangled among bell ropes, dangles above a crowd of foot-stomping peasants.

Many of the Soviet ballet stars who have left home for the West in recent years have complained not about political repression but about the frustrating paucity of good new choreography suitable for their talents. To be sure, most of the defectors come from Leningrad's Kirov Ballet rather than the Bolshoi. The wonder is, though, that they have not been joined by a veritable mob of refugees from the Moscow company, if this dinosaur of a ballet is the best new material they get to perform.

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