Word: bessmertnova
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...years, the Waifish Bolshoi Ballet prima ballerina Natalia Bessmertnova entranced critics with her quick, intense energy and poetic style in classic and contemporary productions, including Giselle, Swan Lake and Spartacus. In 1995 she took on another role when her husband, Bolshoi artistic director Yuri Grigorovich, quit amid a dispute with management over plans for his replacement. Bessmertnova and her fellow dancers refused to perform for a night. The historic strike caused the company's first cancellation in more than two centuries. She was 66 and reportedly had kidney trouble...
...veteran director, Yuri Grigorovich, 60, has a new generation of dancers to show off. Only a handful of the principals on the company's 1979 visit returned, including two senior ballerinas, Natalya Bessmertnova (Grigorovich's wife, who was sidelined almost at once by a leg injury) and Lyudmila Semenyaka. Equally important, after 23 years at the helm, Grigorovich is presenting his finished vision of what the world's largest and most celebrated ballet company ought...
Grigorovich had a lot riding on last year's U.S. tour. A smashing success could have reconfirmed the Bolshoi's stature, boosted morale and quieted the critics. His dancers certainly won their share of bravos: his wife Natalya Bessmertnova, Godunov before his departure, and the young ballerina Lyudmila Semenyaka. In particular, audiences took to their hearts the husband-wife team of Vyacheslav Gordeyev and Nadezhda Pavlova. But Grigorovich's choreography only came in for more lumps. Then there were the defections. Grigorovich returned to Moscow more embattled than ever. He is well connected in the bureaucracy...
...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...
...Natalia Bessmertnova, a slight, dark, fawnlike creature, is a dancer of a wholly different mold. In the title role of Giselle last week, she was all gossamer and grace, a supremely lyrical figure with feathery leaps and arms like ribbons floating in the breeze. Her total involvement, wonderfully reflected in an oval face graced with large, waiflike eyes, lent a touching poignancy to the old story of young love gone astray...