Classical ballet is a world of feathers and flowers, smiles and applause, twirls and tutus. Beneath that sweet surface, however, lies another world: one of punishing physicality, constant stress and head-wrecking rivalry. We've all seen the movie Black Swan, right? We know how these contradictions go.
But even those of us who don't know a pas de deux from a pas de chat appear to have an insatiable appetite for the traditional ballet repertoire. Which is good news for Moscow City Ballet. For the past 25 years it has been delighting western audiences with its touring productions, and will present Giselle and The Nutcracker at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin this month.
Which is why I find myself backstage at the Festival Theatre in Chichester, on the south coast of England, in the dark days after Christmas. I'm here to see a performance of Giselle – and to get a peek behind the scenes as cast, crew and orchestra prepare for another night of sweat, greasepaint and unbelievable athleticism.
As we sneak into the theatre to eavesdrop on an early-evening “company class”, traditional ballet wizardry seems to be in short supply. Instead of the white-clad, sylph-like figures I’ve been dreaming of, the stage is peopled by young folk, many of them in hoodies, hanging about in the sort of sulky clumps familiar to anyone who plays host to a houseful of teenagers.
Disconcertingly, we are close enough to hear the distinctly earthy sound of feet thumping on floor. But the main sound is that of a woman’s voice, shouting instructions in Russian. She appears not to be happy with what’s happening, though we can only understand one word, which recurs every so often like the crack of a whip: “Stop! Stop!”
Ludmila Nerubashenko is responsible for whipping this particular group of dancers – purely verbally, one hopes – into shape. A former prima ballerina, she married Moscow City Ballet’s founder, Victor Smirnov-Golovanov and, since his death in 2013, has been the company’s artistic director. She is clearly not a woman to be messed with. At her barked command the scene is repeated several times; then, suddenly, the dancers disperse and melt away.
It's all a bit of a mystery, frankly. I begin to worry whether I'll be able to make any sense of the evening, let alone of Giselle, a gothic chiller in which girl meets boy, boy behaves badly and girl dies – only for her spirit to rise again, selflessly saving badly-behaved boy's life in the process.
Happily, company manager Martin Taylor is on hand to translate and explain. What we saw was not a rehearsal as such. It was more of a trying-on session, fitting the company, which has just arrived in Chichester, to the stage, which is an unusual one.
There are no wings. There’s no set. The dancers must accustom themselves to this set-up pretty damn quickly, if the corps de ballet is not to find itself shimmying off the edge of the stage into disaster and eternal damnation.
Taylor appears to be a mix of Cockney energy and unflappable calm. Just as well, for it’s his job to get this complex and volatile collection of dancers, backstage crew, orchestra, conductor and assorted bits and pieces – not forgetting make-up and costume departments: a total of some 80 souls – safely from one venue to the next in countries as far apart, geographically and culturally, as Belgium and the United Arab Emirates.
“Today we’ve just come from …” He pauses, grins, raises a finger in triumph. “Cambridge. I had to think for a minute there. We spend so much time on the road.”
They’ll be in Chichester for a week, which is a luxury. And they’re looking forward to spending a whole week in Dublin, too. “I’ve seen the technical dimensions and it’s a normal, proper theatre, isn’t it? It’s got a proscenium, it’s got a flying tower, it’s got bars that come in and out at a good height so we can show the set properly. It’s a big sigh of relief for us, that.”
What’s the biggest headache for the manager of a touring ballet company? “Phew,” he says. “There’s been so many. It’s a day like today – what we call a ‘getting’ day, when we’re getting everything happening at the same time. So we’ve had an orchestra rehearsal, we’ve been doing technical work on stage, I’ve been dealing with things along the line in the tour that are not anything to do with today but still need to be done today. Just, basically, co-ordinating everything so that it all happens.”
In a quiet of the foyer, the prima ballerina, Liliya Oryekhova, has been settled at a table with her interpreter Natalia Shchelokova, ready for interviews. Somewhere along the line, as we’ve made our somewhat frazzled way from one part of the theatre to another, I’ve heard someone describe the young Ukrainian dancer as “very sensitive”. Now that I’ve met her, it seems like a considerable understatement.
Dressed in a dark shirt, her hair pinned up with a spray of tiny blue flowers, Oryekhova offers a birdlike hand and a tense smile. How does she see the character of Giselle? “I think Giselle is something like me,” comes the careful reply. “I believe in people. And sometimes little things might touch my heart.”
Her favourite part of the ballet, she adds, is when the heroine gets to go mad and die of a broken heart. And the most difficult bit? “I think in the second act to be as fluent as possible, and at the same time to keep in position,” she says. “In [the] style and tradition of classical ballet.”
Speaking of the traditions of classical ballet, I have to ask: does Oryekhova use superglue in her pointe shoes? “Niet,” she declares firmly, before her interpreter can get a word in edgeways. But some people do, don’t they? “I did,” Shchelokova admits. I’d love to pursue the topic, but time is marching on.
As her native Ukraine has been going through such a rough time, does ballet represent pure escape for Oryekhova, or do the themes of Giselle in particular – loyalty, betrayal, the quest for an impossible dream – carry a personal message as well?
Oryekhova’s dark eyes grow very wide. A stream of quiet Russian flows across the table. “Every moment in the choreography is heart touching,” says the interpreter. “And I am imagining my family, sometimes, who is still in Donetsk. The ballet theatre there keeps going and performing, also. Trying to be alive.”
The other half of tonight’s central duo, Talgat Kozhabayev, is relaxed, chatty, and blessed with the high cheekbones of the central Asian steppes. Out of all the children in a small town in Kazakhstan “where ballet is not understood at all”, he was chosen for his physique by a visiting committee and shipped off to ballet boarding-school at the age of nine. He has been dancing the role of Albrecht for nearly two decades.
So here’s something else I have to ask. If Albrecht is really a good and noble guy, what’s he doing messing about with Giselle behind his fiancée’s back? Talgat and his interpreter exchange looks. There’s a burst of rapid-fire Russian. “Good question,” is the only answer that emerges at the end of it all.
Such are the contradictions of Giselle. Is it about love and remorse, or manipulation and cynicism? Is the eponymous heroine a starry-eyed kid, or a superior sort of feminist?
As danced by Oryekhova, it turns out, she is both. When she first skips into the spotlight, her warmth and charm are contagious. The mad scene is suitably mental, with hair to match. But it’s during the second act solos that the magic happens. Such is the transformation – and the exquisite nature of her movement across the stage – that I find myself, to my astonishment, actually holding my breath.
We float into the street on a cloud of arabesques and pirouettes and battements. Despite, or maybe because of, our glimpse of the workaday reality behind the scenes, classical ballet has cast its irresistible spell once again. Magic? Are you kidding? We’re enchanted.
The Moscow City Ballet is at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre with Giselle on January 26th and 27th, and The Nutcracker on January 28th, 29th, 30th and 31st
