More than half the dances in this curious tribute to Anna Pavlova were created after her death. Instead of the promised menu of classics and rarities associated with perhaps the greatest ballerina of the past 120 years, we got a pot-luck of whatever the stars cooked up in advance.
At least, in light of recent visa fiascos, the stars did turn up. There were a few no-shows but an evening that can boast Alina Cojocaru, Ulyana Lopatkina, Andrey Merkuriev, Sergei Polunin, Tamara Rojo and Svetlana Zakharova is hardly lacking in sparkle.
Lopatkina, queen of the Mariinsky, went slumming entertainingly in Russkaya — a flawlessly performed pastiche Russian folk dance — and then, deflatingly, reappeared in John Neumeier’s classroom ballet, Pavlova & Cecchetti. This is a popular graduation exercise at St Petersburg’s Vaganova school, and looks like it. Lopatkina’s one-time rival at the Mariinsky, Zakharova, at least put some volts through the Moorish scrolling of Nacho Duato’s Cor Perdut, a duet with the understandably overwhelmed Merkuriev.
There was a better balance between Tamara Rojo and Sergei Polunin, vying with each other as to who could display the most outrageous virtuosity in the pas de deux from Petipa’s Raymonda.
His escape-velocity leaps maybe just shaded it but her rippling shoulders and odalisque embellishments to an inexhaustible series of fouettés meant that, despite portraying a noblewoman, she comfortably out-nautched Evgenia Obraztsova, on next as a bayadère.
The whole evening after Rojo and Polunin limped slowly to a close, with Lopatkina’s second coming as Pavlova delivering the bloodless coup de grace. If anyone really did claim the great ballerina’s mantle, it was Alina Cojocaru earlier in the evening. As Neumeier’s Dame aux Camélias she achieved a transparency of communication that made the actual steps seem unimportant. Everything she did was tenderness and dread, and to watch her was to share in them.
