Word: moiseyev
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...Moiseyev company can be faulted only on small particulars. The pedestrian music, leaning heavily on accordians and weepy gypsy fiddling, sounds like the score for a Mosfilm B movie. The attempts at drama and narrative, as in a cycle called Pictures of the Past, are crude caricature. But there is no arguing with the visual poetry of the performance. The Moiseyev dancers offer great spectacle rather than great art-but that spectacle comes breathlessly close to perfection...
Folk dance, by definition, is an art of the people. One of the curious achievements of Russia's Moiseyev dance company, which opened its first U.S. tour in five years at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House this month, is to make folk dance seem almost aristocratic in spirit. What country commoners could ever attempt, let alone master, those split-second polka whirls and partner changes, those muscle-straining priziadkas done at trip-hammer speed, those leaping, Olympic-height splits? This is dancing performable only by a gifted few-a disciplined and rhythmic elite of superbly talented athletes...
...relationship to authentic folk art as do, say, the Irish Songs of Beethoven. They represent, rather, exalted and stylized kitsch-a form of pop ballet in which folk elements are woven into a formal dance structure created by the company's founder and artistic director, Bolshoi-trained Igor Moiseyev, 64. A prolific choreographer (more than 200 separate works in all), Moiseyev has brought along three new items for the current tour...
Buffoons, set to a theme from Rimsky Korsakov's The Snow Maiden, is a robust, circus-like satire on Old Russia, with a drunken boyar, a devil wielding a pitchfork and a troupe of gymnastic, gnomic clowns. The other two novelties are internationally flavored departures from Moiseyev's customary exploration of the Russian heritage. Sicilian Tarantella is a festive evocation of Italy's traditional folk dance, while Gaucho is a foot-stomping challenge match for three male soloists, dressed like Argentine cowboys on parade. The Latin rhythms have the right ring, but Moiseyev's cowboys look...
...program is devoted to a sampling of the company's favorite showstoppers; familiarity does not dim their luster. In Partisans, a cadre of dancers glides mysteriously across the stage in voluminous black cloaks, suggesting a team of monkish motorcycle racers. The finale is perhaps the most extraordinary Moiseyev dance of them all-a Ukrainian gopak in which half a dozen tireless soloists outbound each other in a sequence of eye-dazzling maneuvers that defy both gravity and credibility...