Word: bolshoi
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...Ballet, the rest to Ballet Theater and to a staggering round of guest appearances. When he accompanied the Ballet Theater to Russia last year, he was so applauded (one critic called him "the greatest male dancer to perform in the Soviet Union in the past 25 years") that the Bolshoi Ballet has invited him as a guest soloist for six months, starting next fall...
...with the knout. One memorable vignette: Secret Police Chief Beria reviling the comatose Stalin as a monster on his deathbed and then dropping to his knees in slobbering sycophancy as the unconscious dictator raises an arm in eerily imperious command. Most striking photographs: the corps de ballet of the Bolshoi company dancing Swan Lake as if in shimmering blue moonlight; a row of Leningrad citizens in bathing suits, queuing up for a bit of winter sunshine...
...festive gaiety. A sumptuously ornamented "New Year's tree" towered 50 ft. high in the vaulted St. George's Hall. Ambassadors, bishops, marshals in all their medals and all the top Soviet bosses thronged the long banquet tables and devoured mounds of caviar and salmon as Bolshoi sopranos sang and a symphony orchestra played. At the stroke of midnight,* Nikita Khrushchev raised his glass of Caucasian wine and shouted: "Happy New Year, comrades!" In great good spirits, he tossed out more toasts-"The heroic working class!" "The collective peasantry!" "The Soviet intelligentsia!" "The all-conquering ideas of Marxism...
...Russians, who for years have been sending a series of movies to New York which amounted to little other than propagandistic harangues (with the Bolshoi thrown in to keep things clean), present us with a warm, deeply moving, and totally human film. This is difficult to reconcile with our concept of a culture that is alien, coldly technological, and unconcerned with problems not directly relating to the Soviet State. So we describe it as a miracle, an artistic exception that proves the rule which we feel comfortable believing in; and, finally we want to conclude that it is above politics...
...closing, let me forewarn balletomaines that though Maya Plisetskaya, second only to Ulanov in the Bolshoi Ballet, does make an appearance, it is a very short one. For 75 seconds, she dances through a droopily choreographed pastiche of ballet and burlesque. She does not, for quite understandable reasons, seem at all interested in the shoddy proceedings...