Word: moiseyev
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Fluttering, whirling, and otherwise kicking up their heels, the 95 dancers of the Moiseyev Dance Company blew into Manhattan last week, as bracing as a shot of Stolichnaya on a midwinter Moscow evening. Almost a half-century old, the venerable Soviet folk troupe was back in the U.S. for the first time in a dozen years. Their three-month, 16-city tour is a prominent part of the cultural exchange program re-established at the 1985 Geneva summit that so far has weathered the always mercurial, adversarial relationship between the superpowers...
...braids and boots, the company has raised folk dancing to a highly regimented, breathtakingly athletic art form. Drawing inspiration from the more than 100 different ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, but predominantly Russian in personnel and outlook, the company remains the personal expression of its founder, Choreographer Igor Moiseyev...
...conflicts of cultural politics may come and go, but the Moiseyev troupe is still stepping smartly through the pastoral frolic of Polyanka (a small meadow), the gentle gibes of the Old City Quadrille and the patriotic harum- scarum of Partisans, signature pieces all. Even the newer works on the program -- the dazzling, how-do-they-do-that At the Skating Rink and the wackily erotic Night on Bald Mountain -- show the same disciplined panache familiar to Americans from earlier visits...
...their best, the Moiseyev dancers offer a kinetic excitement that ought to be the envy of dance companies everywhere. The bodies are lithe, handsome and superbly conditioned, without a saggy, stereotypical babushka in sight, and they move through Moiseyev's short, repetitive kaleidoscopic patterns with elan and assurance. The headstands, the five-foot leaps, the tumbles and twirls are unfailingly impressive, and the music, a wildly eclectic pastiche of Soviet folk songs, Strauss waltzes and Mussorgsky tone poems, rattles along briskly under the baton of Conductor Anatoli Gusj...
Tumbling across the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House are 175 assorted singers, dancers, musicians, mimes-even a troupe of Eskimos-all belonging to Igor Moiseyev's Russian Festival of Music and Dance. Audiences applaud their colorful costumes and boisterous folk art, especially the Ukrainians' vigorous squat jumps and the male toe dancers of the Georgian State Dance Theater...