Dance and Music : Three Minutes With Plisetskaya in Pasadena

Anna Pavlova last danced “The Dying Swan” when she was nearly 50, troubled by knee problems and other signs that her career had run its course. Even then, however, we’re told that her performance of this three-minute signature solo could give any audience a sense of how fragile life’s beauty and freedom can be.

On Saturday, Maya Plisetskaya returned to Pasadena Civic Auditorium, dancing “The Dying Swan” twice (once as an encore) on a benefit program for Los Angeles Classical Ballet. At 66, this former Bolshoi star no longer evokes a creature of the air struggling to escape earthly bonds: Pavlova’s legacy taken into a heroic dimension during Plisetskaya’s prime.

Instead, Mikhail Fokine’s choreography now yields a statement about a ballerina’s resistance and painful submission to the inevitable, with flashes of all-too-human pain and even rage contrasting with the formal technical effects: the still magical rippling arms and shimmering bourrees.

Plisetskaya doesn’t integrate the components of the solo any more but reinterprets it as an interrupted dance, with mime increasingly its focus as she stops skimming the stage on her pointes and sinks deeply into her weight. This conceptual shift allows her to give what she still can, to remain an artist rather than just a ballet celebrity.

In the curtain calls, she refuses to wrap herself in nostalgic glamour a la Alicia Alonso, but behaves as if she’s among friends. In a program full of distorted notions of Russian ballet, she shows us the heart of a great tradition and trusts that we’ll understand.

Unfortunately, Plisetskaya’s influence can’t be glimpsed in the self-aggrandizement of such ex-Soviet dancers as Alexander Greschenko and Alla Khaniashvili-Artyushkina on the same, 10-part Los Angeles Classical Ballet gala.

Whether they’re using grotesque mannerisms to camouflage mediocre technique (Greschenko in an excerpt from “Le Corsaire”) or aggressively punching out bravura steps (Khaniashvili-Artyushkina in the “Don Quixote” pas de deux), these former Bolshoi members embody a hard-sell flamboyance that travesties the Bolshoi humanism exemplified by such contemporary icons as Natalia Bessmertnova and Alexei Fadeyechev, Irek Mukhamedov and, among the emerging generation, Yuri Posokhov.

To the contrary, they specialize in Russian camp, Olga-from-the-Volga exoticism. It sells, but at what a price.

In much better shape than when he danced the Los Angeles Classical Ballet “Nutcracker” on this same stage, Vitali Artyushkin at least conveys a genuine love of dance in both the “Don Quixote” duet and the magnificently vulgar Crassus/Aegina showpiece from Yuri Grigorovich’s “Spartacus” (again with Khaniashvili-Artyushkina). And, as always, he partners strongly.

Better still, Galina Shlyapina (Moscow State Ballet Theatre) can delicately express the frequent mood swings of David Allan’s solo “Villanella” and conquer most of the technical challenges in the “Corsaire” duet without ever seeming rushed or inhuman or straining to impress.

The company as a whole looks typically subprofessional in the classical rigors of Andre Prokovsky’s “Faust Divertimento,” but spirited and disciplined in both Helen Coope’s folk-influenced “Aymara” and Allan’s jazzy “Etc!,” two suites in which the women don’t wear toe shoes and the men don’t face many partnering hazards.

Despite the prominence of the Russians, the most meticulous classicism comes courtesy of the company’s Chinese contingent, especially Yi Jang in the “Faust” trio and Tzer-Shing Wang in both a solo from the same work and a mercurial excerpt from Allan’s “On Occasion.”

Canadian guest artist Michel Gervais has plenty of style, if not quite enough stamina, for the big “Etc!” solo and Edward Cueto dances a central role in “Aymara” with exactly the sunny simplicity it needs.

Completing the program: a pas de deux billed as Fokine’s “Harlequinade,” though no work of that title appears in either Fokine’s memoirs or Cyril Beaumont’s biography. Besides this mystery, it’s notable for the pianism of Karl Moraski, the only live music of the evening.