VanCleef & Arpels on the summer night. Nonna Ananieva

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      The lights went out. The orchestra began playing. The curtains swept back.… With every minute the performance became more and more intriguing. It was quite another kind of ballet. The dance was depicting the music; it was not quite clear what was accompanying what. Plot was rendered totally unnecessary. It was kind of symbiosis of light and ballet and music. First it seemed a bit weird, as though I was waiting for a prince who was never going to come. The most important thing was that it was not showcasing some kind of artful technique or elegant sequence of movements: it was another vision entirely, the same kind of beauty presented in a different way – the beauty of the human body and of musicality. It soon became clear to me that even costumes and decorations were superfluous. Each ballerina was her own self: young, airy, light, like a morning dream of a better world to come. ‘Ballet is the most innocent, the most ethical of all the arts. If it were not so, why should people always take their children to the theatre?’ This was what Tchaikovsky told his friend Herman Laroche on reading in some newspaper that the ballet exists just to excite the faded desires of old men. I read about it in Passion for Tchaikovsky by Solomon Volkov. A lot was also written about plot in that book, about how Peter Ilyich actually had no serious interest in plot – and indeed, how can anybody take the plot of Lebedinoye Ozero (Swan Lake) seriously? It’s not like Richard III, for example, in which there’s absolutely no need for dance. Dance cannot represent people’s intrigues and fratricide on stage nearly as well as words can. Mood and sense, however, can be depicted by the ballet. Is it really more powerful? When the brilliant union of a composer and a choreographer takes place, then yes, it can be much more powerful. And everybody is free to their own artistic preferences, their own modes of self-expression, according to their soul’s needs at different moments in their lives. The only thing that strikes me as undeniable is that it is very difficult for a person without art – it is almost impossible to develop, to acquire a full knowledge of life, to be kind and loving. Well, the actor just recites phrases learnt by heart, the musician reads the music, the ballet-dancer knows exactly how to move on the stage. And would it have been better if she had not learnt her part? If she hadn’t rehearsed till exhaustion? Plot is not the main thing. When Balanchine toured the USSR at the beginning of sixties, he had been accused of formalism, of dances without a plot. And here I was, watching his chorographical creations in the Bolshoi, performed by the Theatre’s own troop of dancers. I liked it.