Quotes of the Day

The hulking construction site on Teatralnaya square in downtown Moscow doesn't look like much. Situated on a dead-end mere blocks from the colorful spires of Red Square and the dazzling neon of Tverskaya shopping district, it's just another of the city's many renovation projects surrounded by barbed wire and covered with a thick layer of dust. But beneath rickety scaffolding, the building's towering columns and gilded fixtures tell a different story. Under renovation since 2005, this is the Bolshoi Theater, home of the fabled 231-year-old Bolshoi Ballet Company. From his cozy office in the Bolshoi's labyrinthine headquarters across the square, artistic director Alexei Ratmansky can see the theater site through a window. "The general atmosphere here is of something building — not falling apart," he says, his voice not much louder than the construction noise outside. He's not just talking about new upholstery on the theater's seats. A far more thorough renovation is going on, for Ratmansky is attempting to refurbish not just the Bolshoi's architecture, but its global stature as well. Once the world's pre-eminent classical dance company, the Bolshoi was in steep artistic decline when, in January 2004, Ratmansky was chosen, at age 35, to bring the troupe back from the brink of irrelevance and remake it into a cultural force befitting its heritage. It's a strategy that's risky yet necessary if the company is to reclaim its place not just as a custodian of the classics but also as an innovative producer of superlative new ballet. Ratmansky hopes that, like the Old Theater's crumbling facade, the Bolshoi's repertoire can be rebuilt — keeping what is old and beautiful while fixing its battered foundation.

Founded in 1776 on the orders of Catherine the Great, the Bolshoi practically defined the art form of ballet. But it did not achieve its near mythical standing until after the 1917 revolution, Moscow was made capital and the Bolshoi became a primary cultural ambassador of the newly founded Soviet Union — a role it maintained for the next seven decades. Through the years, the Old Theater's stage was home to some of dance's biggest names, including Galina Ulanova, who danced the definitive Romeo and Juliet in the 1950s, and her contemporaries, the couple Ekaterina Maximova and Vladimir Vasiliev. During the height of the cold war, it remained one of the Soviet Union's most potent exports. Beautiful and mysterious, the Russian dancers' sleek lines and avant-garde choreography dazzled Westerners.

But in the 1970s, Western dance began to catch up. Rising companies like the American Ballet Theater, the San Francisco Ballet and the Royal Ballet of Winnipeg began producing challenging new works. The Bolshoi, meanwhile, under the longtime leadership of artistic director Yuri Grigorovich and ideologically locked behind the Iron Curtain, simply stopped updating its repertoire. By the time the cold war's walls started to fall

In 1989, the grittier, jazzier, more daring Western dance had become the new global standard. Now free to emigrate legally, Russian dancers followed famous cold war defectors, like the Kirov Ballet's Mikhail Baryshnikov, West by the dozens, looking for more complex choreography, brighter fame and bigger paychecks.

In 1995, Grigorovich quit after more than three decades as artistic director, but his departure brought only more turmoil. A battle between those allied to the outgoing leader — a communist supporter and strict authoritarian — and those seeking change polarized an already embattled corps of dancers and musicians. Leadership changed hands four times between 1995 and 2004, including a stint by famed former principal dancer Vasiliev, who was unceremoniously dismissed in 2000 by Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. The short-lived replacements were all part of Russian ballet's insular old guard. "They were doing Sleeping Beauty the way it had always been done," says Andre Lewis, artistic director of Canada's Royal Winnipeg Ballet, North America's second oldest ballet company. "The Bolshoi was stultified. It needed to change."

Enter Ratmansky. Born in St. Petersburg, trained at the Moscow State Academy of Choreography and boasting professional experience with Ukraine's Kiev Ballet, the Royal Winnipeg and seven years with the Royal Copenhagen Ballet, he had already staged his productions at the Kirov Ballet in St. Petersburg, as well as a new production of Anna Karenina in Copenhagen. His knowledge of Western dance and his strength as a choreographer were, according to Bolshoi Theater director general Anatoly Iksanov, just what the company needed to reclaim its standing in the newly modernized world of ballet. With impressive choreography credentials yet no management experience, Ratmansky assumed the helm of an organization that employs more than 200 dancers and coaches and is, this season, staging more than 200 performances at home and on tour. He also oversees the newly reinvigorated Bolshoi School, the company's legendary Moscow training grounds, and its annexes in Brazil and Australia.

Before Ratmansky's arrival at Teatralnaya Square, the company's relationship with the Russian government had been on shaky ground. Toward the end of Grigorovich's tenure, as the company was consumed by internal squabbles and its touring productions were poorly received, government funding dried up. By 2000, President Putin, frustrated with ever-increasing delays in the Old Theater reconstruction project, ordered the Bolshoi to report directly to the Ministry of Culture, which would keep a tight rein on its finances. By the following year, the Bolshoi's estimated annual budget was substantially lower than other top ballet companies. But now, with more dancers, more productions, lavish tours and the very expensive Old Theater renovation, there's clearly millions more being thrown at the Bolshoi than before Ratmansky's arrival.

After Ratmansky took office, he quickly addressed his foremost challenge: uniting a company in deep discord while redirecting its repertory. There was no doubt the Bolshoi lacked artistic focus. But how to keep traditionalists satisfied while simultaneously introducing new work? "I wanted to find a repertoire that would be the new phase of the Bolshoi," Ratmansky says. "It's about resurrecting [older] ballets and bringing in people to make new classics."

At the Bolshoi and elsewhere, choreography is embracing shorter, smaller-scale pieces, and that trend has led to a dearth of big-star roles. "People aren't choreographing for stars anymore — they're not doing Swan Lake," says Lynn Garafola, a dance historian and author of Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance. Increasingly, it's choreographers like Ratmansky who are taking their place as ballet's headliners. In one of Ratmansky's most celebrated moves, for example, in 2003 he restaged Bright Stream, the full-length ballet by radical Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, which Stalin banned shortly after it premiered in Moscow in 1936. Ratmansky looks forward, too: his own creation, Go for Broke, features modern steps and bright yellow unitards, marking quite a departure from the traditional tutus and pink leotards of Cinderellas past. "You can't call any choreography that's done today classical," Ratmansky says. With Stream and Broke already regarded as the choreographer's defining works, Ratmansky's productions have been received enthusiastically in Moscow and throughout Europe and the U.S.

Not that he hasn't faltered, sometimes spectacularly. His MTV-infused version of Romeo and Juliet was intended to reach young patrons, but when it toured in the West in the summer of 2005, it bombed with audiences and critics alike. But for Ratmansky, failure is just the occasional price of trying new things. "I would do it again," he shrugs. "It was a breakthrough for the company. There were a lot of younger people in the audience. Tastes are different everywhere; something that was adored in Paris might be hated in London."

To complement its new repertoire, the Bolshoi also has a new venue. A smaller mint green theater called the New Stage completes the trifecta of Bolshoi buildings on Teatralnaya Square. Eerily similar in appearance to the Old Mariinsky Theater building in St. Petersburg, home to the Bolshoi's longtime rival the Mariinsky (formerly the Kirov) Ballet, it has, since 2005, become the company's interim Moscow home. Ratmansky says the Old Theater, whose renovation is costing hundreds of millions of dollars, will reopen in fall 2008. In the meantime, he says, "we do tour quite a bit," including a recent trip through Siberia involving nearly 200 dancers, musicians, singers, technicians and designers.

With the Bolshoi now firmly recommitted to invention, Ratmansky was able to lure two of the biggest names in Western ballet — the American director and choreographer Twyla Tharp, and the energetic young British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon to each produce a one-act ballet at the Bolshoi this season. (Wheeldon's, a brand-new work called Misericors, debuted on Feb. 13.) "I don't want the Bolshoi to be the work of just one choreographer," Ratmansky says. Unlike years past, when a dancer's name — like Baryshnikov or Maximova — would be a key advertising point, at the new Bolshoi it is choreographers Wheeldon and Tharp who are the big draws. Their arrival in Moscow "heralds a more youthful, flexible approach to choreography," says Winnipeg's Lewis. "What Ratmansky is doing may change ballet."

Despite this emphasis on new work, Ratmansky is staying true to one of his original wishes — to keep the Bolshoi's illustrious history alive in its dance. Bright Stream, he notes, was based on Muscovite traditions, and he will continue to produce classical pieces, including this season's Don Quixote. "The classical ballet is so perfect in itself — it can't die away," he says. So far, Ratmansky's strategy is paying off. If the smiles and good cheer at its Moscow headquarters are any clue, Ratmansky has pulled the Bolshoi out of its deep Dostoyevskian funk. "There's a great feeling there, one of family and teamwork," says Wheeldon, who recently spent nearly two months working on his new piece with the company. Ticket sales are brisk, and this season will see some 60 more performances than last. And among dance historians, authors and critics the general consensus is that the Bolshoi's got its groove back — or, perhaps, a new groove that suits it just fine.

On a recent night at the New Stage, a stream of patrons filed in for the premiere of The Ballets of George Balanchine — the legendary classical choreographer whom Ratmansky cites as a prime inspiration. While tourists posed for photos in the lobby, balletomanes lined up to purchase Bolshoi magnets and T shirts, and ushers hawked commemorative calendars, Ratmansky slipped unnoticed into a back booth. Ignoring the commotion and scribbling notes, he kept his eye trained solely on his ballerinas, who wore the Bolshoi's traditional monochrome leotards and leaped and jetéed to Balanchine's original choreography. The performance was exquisite, and if you watched the stage very closely, as Ratmansky did, it seemed as though the Bolshoi had never missed a step.

• KAREN LEIGH | MOSCOW
• While Moscow's historic Bolshoi Theater gets a makeover, its eponymous ballet company steps out of the wings and back into the spotlight, thanks to a daring new boss