Tom's Life Bits

Wow, one of the best Copellia's I have seen. A huge cast, Libbie said she counted 48 dancers on stage. High energy and even higher kicks by the principals make this a very memorable performance. Natalia Osipova was dazzling!!!!

The Bolshoi's new production of Coppélia could have been staged entirely for the benefit of Natalia Osipova. Dancing Swanilda, the ballet's flirty, feisty heroine, she gets to show off her unique and astonishing range – from snub-nosed ingenue to grand ballerina, with all shades of spinning virtuosity and cute mischief in between.

Even in stillness, Osipova looks more alive than anyone else on stage. Her wide, challenging eyes, enormous grin and mockingly angled brows are already telling Swanilda's story before she has begun to move. Once she's dancing, you don't look at anyone else.

Technically, there is little Osipova can't do. Her sharp, flexible little feet make flashing stitchwork out of Swanilda's tiniest steps and jumps; her arms make floating music with the score. When she's throwing out big, fast développés – her legs unfurling high in the air – she's calmly lifting up her petticoats and smiling with glee. And she's still scattering treats and surprises all through the third act, adding a whirling flourish of fouettés and leaping halfway across the stage to be caught in Franz's final embrace.

This new Coppélia, staged by Sergei Vikharev, has gone all the way back to the Cecchetti-Petipa production of 1894. The Royal Ballet's version uses the same text, but readings vary, and the Bolshoi's Coppélia is on a much more opulent scale than the Royal's.

In the first act, for instance, the Mazurka and Czardas are not spontaneous, villagey affairs, but grand divertissements, the stage packed with stamping, heel-clicking dancers. In the wedding festivities of the third act, where Swanilda and her straying fiance Franz are finally united, the delicately symbolic variations – Dawn, Prayer etc – are vamped into an elaborate allegorical interlude, complete with full corps de ballet and a giant clock presided over by an angel and cherubs.

This may well be a more authentic reading of the ballet, but it brings with it a different mode of storytelling and character. Coppélius is presented as a generic boffin, lacking the eccentricity, loneliness and bitterness that, in the Royal's production, make him so odd and scary. And while Ruslan Skvortsov dances an appealing Franz, the Bolshoi's acting style makes his spats with Swanilda and his skirt-chasing follies a little less funny than they should be.

There is no definitive Coppélia, however; every new staging adds a new slant. And the Bolshoi's is everything you would want it to be: very big, very Russian and danced to the hilt.

By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

On Sunday morning, in a live transmission of the Bolshoi Ballet’s production of the three-act “Coppélia,” the extraordinary ballerina Natalia Osipova bounded with her characteristic élan onto a New York cinema screen. The camera — though only employing close-ups for acting passages — often followed her full-frame, so that we had only a blurry sense of the space around her: disorienting but exciting. In the intimate cinema, people kept starting to applaud.

Her brio was unfailing. Quick jumps that usually stay close to the floor became, with her, astoundingly high. The rascally, holy-terror side of her personality has no better vehicle. Though “Coppélia” will be one of the three ballets she dances this June and July at American Ballet Theater, this was much more than just a taste of what’s to come. It also showed us the Bolshoi Ballet itself, too long absent from New York stages, and its first-rate 2009 production of “Coppélia,” a stylish reconstruction of the 1894 St. Petersburg staging.

The current series of internationally broadcast live performances of ballet is a bigger deal than most New York

dancegoers yet realize. This year some of us, but too few, have watched direct transmissions from the Royal Ballet in London, the Paris Opera Ballet and the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow. Whether you’re interested in dancers or choreography or productions, there has been much to see and learn. Is it because these broadcasts happen sporadically, at various times of day and the week, that Big Cinemas Manhattan, on East 59th Street, has not been packed?

True, on Sunday it was very nearly so — but since this was Ms. Osipova, the Bolshoi and “Coppélia,” it was reasonable to have expected a line of people fighting for returned tickets. Doubtless the balletomanes currently thronging the vast Lincoln Center theaters during this ballet spring prefer to be in the same space as a live performance, but you’d think from the number of people who watch ballet clips on YouTube that more of them would make their way to watch one in a movie theater. We don’t see the Bolshoi enough that we can afford to skip these sightings.

Anyone interested in “Coppélia” would find this production rewarding. This old Russian version, choreographed by Marius Petipa and Enrico Cecchetti, long ago fell into neglect in Russia, while it has become a fixture for many Western companies — the two most textually distinguished productions being New York City Ballet’s from 1974 (largely based, especially its first two acts, by Alexandra Danilova and George Balanchine on their memories of the staging they had known in Russia over 50 years before) and the Royal Ballet’s.

This Moscow “Coppélia” was reconstructed by Sergei Vikharev — who has supervised a number of Mariinsky revivals in St. Petersburg — and he based it on notation by Nicholas Sergeyev, who staged it in London in the 1930s for the company that is now the Royal Ballet. The designers (Boris Kaminsky, sets; Tatiana Noginova, costumes) have likewise returned to the look of the 1894 staging.

Since the dance notation of the late 19th and early 20th century was patchy, you sometimes deduce where Mr. Vikharev has supplemented its deficiencies and also where he would have been wise to consult other versions. There is, in particular, film in the New York Public Library of Danilova dancing the Act III pas de deux that shows a far more nuanced understanding of the old steps (especially the solo) than Ms. Osipova’s interpretation.

Even if you see where it could be improved, though, this “Coppélia” is at once the equal of any in the West. The Bolshoi dancers have taken to this ballet as if to the manner born. It revives old Russian traditions of strongly delivered mime dialogue and European folk dances (here the mazurka and czardas), which they deliver with freshness, panache and verve. Gennadi Yanin plays Dr. Coppélius not as a buffoon but as a flesh-and-blood scientist with warmth and pathos.

Ms. Osipova and Vyacheslav Lopatin both look enchantingly teenage as Swanilda and Frantz; the element of childish play in the characters becomes real. That’s why you wish Ms. Osipova would learn further dimensions for the Act III bridal pas de deux, which should have more womanly poise than she has yet to discover. One sequence in the Act I all-female variations could be phrased with more legato; another could be given with a much bigger sideways twist of the torso. Otherwise, there’s little to do but rejoice and marvel at what she does in the first two acts, and in her technical delivery of the steps throughout.

Some of Ms. Osipova’s jumps explode like firecrackers; traveling downstage in a forward diagonal of beaten jumps (brisés), she eats up so much space that she has only room to do five. In the rapidly plunging and slicing footwork, the strength of her rhythm is a thrill. There’s a real hooligan side to this Swanilda. I don’t remember any ballerina taking so naturally to the ruthless scamp side of the character.

Mr. Lopatin’s bright-eyed and dimpled boyishness is a sweet foil for her. In jumps and turns he has plenty of flair, but what you remember is his impish rightness for the character. I hope we see more of him.

Perhaps we will. Seven more Bolshoi Ballet broadcasts are scheduled in the next 13 months. The Nov. 20 performance of “Sleeping Beauty” will also show the official reopening of the Bolshoi Theater after its renovation. (In an intermission we were given sneak previews of the work being done by the restorers.) Bravo to the company for letting us see in these broadcasts what we have been missing.