Word: swanning
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...dual role of Odette-Odile in Swan Lake is one of ballet's supreme challenges, and there are many women who meet it with grace and liquid beauty. Plisetskaya, though, is unique. In the limpid forest glade scenes of Act II, most good dancers prettily suggest a girl imitating a swan. In a breathtaking act of theatrical magic, Plisetskaya somehow becomes a lovely humanoid swan giving a passable imitation of a shy maiden. This remarkable ballerina is now 48, and her short, chunky legs have clearly lost some of their spring. But Plisetskaya's legs seem almost secondary...
First-nighters were lucky enough to see Plisetskaya display two startlingly different aspects of her phenomenal talent. She began the evening by dazzling the Metropolitan Opera House audience as Odette in the second act of Swan Lake, and ended it by starring in Carmen Suite, a ballet created especially for her (a rare tribute in the Soviet Union). In between, a dozen or so other soloists performed snippets from the stodgy Bolshoi repertory that allowed them to show off little more than their remarkable discipline...
...high stumps with protrusions that extended like arms, curving formations that looked like the neck and head of a swan, and linked tubes that resembled a string of sausages in a butcher's shop. But the size and shape of these flows indicated that the molten rock had not been forced out under tremendous pressure. On the contrary, it seemed to have simply peaked from the interior of the earth through cracks created as the earth's surface was stretched. Explained Bryan: "Like a cobblestone street, the earth's crust can be pulled apart very easily...
...redemption-if it is in the human condition, it is in the Shakespearean canon. Most of the year, Shakespeare resides quietly in the volumes of his work. But each summer he thunders and chuckles in festivals from the Spokane Expo to Central Park. For those sun-flooded weeks, the Swan of Avon returns to the group for whom he really wrote - the audience. This year, as in the 370-odd before, that audience will find whatever it seeks in the ceaselessly contemporary productions...
...wheat bundles. At 36, Nureyev has acquired a new maturity; his dancing is less mannered. In solo work he seems eerily to be improvising-as if he were taking each leap for the first time. And he is trying out new roles: clown prince, for instance, rather than swan prince...