The Kirov Ballet is the company that the choreographer George Balanchine left behind when he sailed from Russia in 1924. It is the company from which Rudolf Nureyev defected in 1961, followed by Natalia Makarova in 1970, and Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1974. Formerly known as the Imperial Ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre (named after Czar Alexander II’s wife Marie), the Kirov is the great Russian mother company, a matryoshka doll hatching dancer after dancer—an infinity of dancers—from its Imperial School on Theatre Street, a continuum of star pupils that includes the legendary names Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, Vaslav Nijinsky. The company that is today called The Kirov Ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre—still Dickensian in its selection standards; still trained within the meticulous, luminous rounds of Vaganova technique; still a constellation of coaches pushing, pulling, their protegés to the top —she is always there, like Everest.

But we all have issues with our mothers. Perhaps no ballet company in the world is more daunting to write about than the Kirov. The company has a deep and detailed past which is the stuff of scholars, and a performance history that is hard to know given restrictions during the Cold War. And then there are the politics: the fact that Russian defectors escaped to the United States to dance; that it was Manhattan Balanchine chose as the concrete-and- steel setting for his New York City Ballet; and that it was American dancers on which he built his neoclassical style. Yes, Balanchine cherished his years in the Mariinsky school, drawing deeply on the sights and sounds of his childhood, his Proustian connection to ballets scaled for a czar. Solomon Volkov’s book Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky, a series of interviews in which the choreographer talks about the composer, is a rich remembrance of things past in St. Petersburg (“Everyone thinks the tsar’s box at the Mariinsky Theater is in the middle. But actually, it was on the side, on the right… . We would be lined up by size and presented. We were given chocolate in silver boxes, wonderful ones!”). Once Balanchine got down to work in America, however, he had to use what was at hand—no czars, no state school housing a classical tradition, no old world chocolates, but instead, strong, long-boned, USDA bodies ready to work hard to be classical. Balanchine had to start from scratch, and he began by establishing his School of American Ballet. Necessity would be the mother of invention.

What does this mean in practical terms? That Balanchine would choreograph to American strengths: a leggy athleticism, a competitive desire to prove oneself, a direct and down-to-earth presentation. He sought that quality of the quotidian that all mid-century American moderns were seeing as higher truth. “‘Don’t pretend to dance,’ he would say,” Suki Schorer writes in the first chapter of her recent book Balanchine Technique. It was another way of saying, don’t pretend to be what you are not, dancers with a deep tradition. New York was a new world and this was a classicism dimensionally unmoored, thinner, more linear, more musically prodigal—not Genesis, but Revelations—a powerful next chapter in the history of classical dance.

Balanchine believed in both God and fate, and it is in keeping with the mystic aspect of his life that after leaving Russia and landing in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes he choreographed The Prodigal Son (1929), a dance with an angular, openly sexual pas de deux between a rebellious boy and a looming, elusive Siren, Felia Doubrovska of the long long legs. But Balanchine never did go home. He continued to heed the siren’s song, and forever following that song, he made a repertory in the West that is its own world with its own metaphysics. In short, the prodigal ascended to messiah status, and in the last year of his life, when his Catalogue of Works was finally published, he kept it at his bedside where it was referred to as “the Bible.” Hence, when the Kirov comes to New York, it’s a bit like the Old Testament abutting the New, and a defensive sense of competing religions can creep into people’s responses.

The catechism began in 1989, when, after a twenty-five year absence and in the flush of glasnost, the Kirov Ballet came to New York’s Metropolitan Opera House with two Balanchine ballets included in its repertory—Theme and Variations and Scotch Symphony. At the time, there was much coverage of the event, emotions focusing on what a great step into the present tense it was for the Russians, and how poignant it would be to see Balanchine danced by the company of his upbringing. And it was poignant. But there was also a general feeling of uncertainty, a discomfited jostling over what the Kirov should be striving for in its dancing of Balanchine. There were those who wanted a City Ballet facsimile, who seemed to feel the Kirov was old-fashioned and outmoded and should just Go West. Why aren’t the dancers rolling through the foot like we do? Why aren’t they faster, more forward on the hips? Why? For the same reason our dancers don’t have the Kirov’s gravity in stillness, or the upper-body energy to carry a fairy tale, a century, in their arms. It’s not what either is trained to do. For those who excused the Kirov’s not being NYCB there was magic in the company’s Theme and Variations, in the way it connected tonally with the company’s full-length Sleeping Beauty (also performed that tour)—the lullaby weight that makes the court palpable, a sense of forever that breathes in the bourrees.

The Kirov was then run by Oleg Vinogradov and the roster of ballerinas was a mixed bag. There were older women of great integrity like Tatiana Terekhova and Galina Mezentseva, but they were deemed Soviet in style and thus passé. Altynai Asylmuratova was the chosen one, having been earlier anointed in The New Yorker. She had a dark ardor, a Tartar princess face, but a faulty technique which she hid under excesses of line and a puffed-up posture. Yulia Makhalina was coming up fast, yet she too reached for extremes of line, her dancing as overdone, labored, as little Zhanna Ayupova’s was modest, light. The funny thing is, the afterimages I hold from that engagement, the moments burned in memory, belong to the two women least poised to please on American terms. I still see blonde, plain Terekhova in attitude on pointe, fixed in space as if bronzed; and Mezentseva in Scotch Symphony, a wraith in pink tulle, a pinwheeling ghost.

Vinogradov favored the Makhalinas. In the early 1990s, perhaps in the reach to read globally, company style went to new extremes, the principal women becoming too attenuated and too deliberate at once, stretching and slowing (the worst of west and east). When the Kirov brought an all-Diaghilev bill to New York in 1995—an evening of Firebirds and Golden Slaves, velvet pillows and beaded bras—the company seemed to be at sea in the exotic, all slinky navels and snaky limbs. That was the season in which Uliana Lopatkina surfaced, with her Theda Bara eyes, and body as taut as a tusk. Kirov ballet dancing was beginning to look like Russian ice dancing, a sort of skinny kitsch classicism shipped in for tourists.

But as I’ve written before in these pages, dance companies wax and wane, fade and blossom. And shortly after that 1995 engagement things changed. Vinogradov, an impassive man who ran the company coldly and unfortunately was getting it to dance that way, was expelled in a financial scandal. After an interim leadership shared by Farukh Ruzimatov and Makhar Vasiev, both Kirov principals at the time, Vasiev was made director of the ballet. And he was answering to Valery Gergiev, the uncompromising conductor who’d been artistic director of the Kirov Opera since 1988, and who in 1996 became director of the entire Mariinsky Theatre, thus bringing a blazing international spotlight to the ballet.

Who can say what is the best recipe for artistic regeneration? Certainly there can be none without raw material in the corps. But there must also be someone driving at the top, a leader with teeth and taste. Having a world-renowned musician at the helm of the Mariinsky has been a compelling development. And Vasiev, who directs the company daily, he clearly has an eye for talent, a gift for proportion. When the Kirov returned to the Met in 1999, with a restored version of its original Sleeping Beauty, it was as if the company itself had woken from a bad dream. Except for some super-high extensions à la seconde (leg up by the ear)—an instance of Kirov women catching an obnoxious western trend—the dancers looked at ease within their skin. The tempos were bright, the line was clean (so much hyperbole pruned away), and the dancing was big. Doing that Beauty seemed to jolt the company, remind it of something it was losing in the whole Western question. Kirov history, its theatrical values, its pride of place and placement—that Vaganova upper body which rounds out of the pelvic bowl to make the torso, head, and arms a sphere of infinite poesy—this was something to embrace.

Indeed, the change in Lopatkina was symbolic. So scary in 1995, with her sinews of steel, she returned softer, warmer. In the second movement of Balanchine’s Symphony in C, she took quiet possession of the music, putting her strength at the service of phrasing, a performance that opened like an orchid. In fact, she outdanced any Americans I’ve seen in the role since. And it wasn’t just Lopatkina. Diana Vishneva was setting a standard for fully articulated dancing, her whole body alive, and younger dancers Daria Pavlenko and Veronika Part were rising like cream. When it was announced a few months later that the Kirov was planning to take on Balanchine’s monumental Jewels—a ballet exquisitely difficult to cast because it requires five phenomenal women, a tall order these days even at NYCB—it seemed not only perfect timing, but a gauntlet tossed with air kisses.

The Kirov came back to the Met for two weeks this July, with Jewels programmed for the last three days of the engagement, and a restored La Bayadère up at the front. Petipa’s 1877 foray into Orientalism, La Bayadère is a story of doomed love between a temple dancer and a warrior—a sort of Giselle amid the palms and altars of India. As with The Sleeping Beauty three years ago, here was an effort to retrieve the original, to see what it looked like, and to trace one’s own bone structure in the face of an ancestor. What the company found in Beauty was a colorful, brimming, and bumptious affair—a ballet not distant, misty, at all, as so many productions, including the Kirov’s, had since become. What we find with this La Bayadère, dated to 1900 and pieced together from archives in Russia and at Harvard, is that it too was laid out with more leisure, pockets of concentrated choreography spaced between gay processionals. It’s a different rhythm than we’re used to, especially as we head into this new century, where third and sometimes even second intermissions are being dropped from full-length ballets, squeezing the ballets tight between babysitters and train schedules—stressing the pace and distorting the shape. These Kirov restorations remind one that ballet is an art of the eye and the eye must have its rests. It is a reality Balanchine learned well. His first full-length hit in America was The Nutcracker (1954) and he admitted the Act I party dances were somewhat dull, prosaic—they were there to set up the imaginative flights of Act II. In this La Bayadère the surprise is the Act IV wedding, and it’s a wow. No longer a stumpy remnant of an act no one quite remembers, it is now a vivid ricercar, with all the ballet’s narrative and expressive motifs—life and death, prose and poetry, pageant and pas de deux—tightly interwoven, compressed, a fugue state in tutus. There is nothing in ballet quite like it.

But ballet is also an art of the ear. La Bayadère’s score by Ludwig Minkus, except for a few haunting melodies, is by-the-yard with only passing coherence (one minute it sounds like Tchaikovsky, the next, Offenbach). The restored score doesn’t bring additional aural build to the ballet—the final momentum is all Petipa’s—and despite the choreographic mastery of Act IV, one can come away feeling that other of the nips and tucks over time have a sense about them. A tighter Bayadère may be a better Bayadère. For where The Sleeping Beauty makes continuity, life, its theme, thereby benefiting from duration, a horizontal flow, La Bayadère is all vows and venom, a triangle between love, murder, and eternity. The distillation that has occurred over the decades, the cutting away of explanatory scenes set to shallow music (as when the ghost of Nikiya appears in Solor’s room before his dream of her begins), makes for steeper narrative drop-offs, a terrain more in tune with this ballet of pitch and abyss.

And yet, just as in The Sleeping Beauty, it was inspiring to see these dancers engage with the wide vistas opening around them. When Vladimir Ponomarev, the High Brahmin in red robes, plants himself at the footlights, he might be a baritone braced for his opening note, pulling it up by the root. The dancers have a sense of theater—the spotlight and the gaslight and the stage as a space without a ceiling, larger than life. Some might call this corny, but seeing it anew, art as unshakeable belief, I felt how much I miss it. I think audiences miss it too, which goes a long way to explaining why opera, a high art not nearly as audience-friendly as dance (even with supertitles), has the fastest growing following of all the performing arts. La Bayadère set the scale for this engagement as well as the standard for dancing, line that sings to an ideal, a line you see even in the men.

I feel sympathy for the male dancer of today. Our taste for superstars, for macho guys who’ve defected from somewhere, or who treat ballet as an artsy form of sport, is a law of diminishing returns. One need only look at the troubling trajectory of Angel Corella at American Ballet Theatre. So promising in his first years—pure raw talent—he seemed to be reaching for artistry, working with focus. But the last three Met seasons have seen him settle for cheap flash, hard sell, a giving-in you see in his physique, which has literally settled (his legs look thicker, his line shorter). Carlos Acosta, another technical wiz, joined ABT this season. He was formerly with the Houston Ballet, where much was made of his having come from Cuba (well, there aren’t too many places left to defect from). We seem to need back story in our men, extracurricular derring-do. And yet the ABT season’s most exciting performances from a male dancer came from Marcelo Gomes, a tall, dark, ardent young man whose most exotic bit of biographical data is that he studied with the Paris Opera Ballet. Gomes dares to care about classicism. He has gorgeous épaulement (the nuanced modeling of the upper body)—quite a bit better than most ABT women—and a yearning port de bras. In his debut Giselle with Paloma Herrera, the Act II dancing was so curvaceously wrought, so insular, it seemed they were alone in a bower in a bubble. You could see Herrera respond to this intimacy (who wouldn’t?). She found a new softness in herself.

I can’t say what will happen to Gomes at ABT, whether he will eventually give way to jock posturing, or will be encouraged to follow his lights. But I thought of him while watching the Kirov. “These men are not afraid to be beautiful.” It is the first thing I wrote in my notebook, and the first flush of pleasure the company offered: men dancing with whole hearts (not an eye watching the audience watch them), and a refinement that reached to the fingertips. As Solor in La Bayadère, Andrian Fadeyev and Viacheslav Samodurov both performed mime that drew up from the tailbone, articulation something between animal and angel, a mammalian largesse. All the men seemed to be working in the grain of their particular gifts—Fadeyev’s aristocratic dispatch; Samodurov’s compact landings, swiftly torqued; Vasili Scherbakov’s arrow-like loft and eiderdown aplomb; Danila Korsuntsev’s rangy grace. No one was fighting to take the stage by swagger.

As the company moved through its program of Bayadères, Don Q’s, and Swan Lakes, heading toward the floating castle that is Jewels, its greatest glory was revealed: the ballerinas. There isn’t a company in the world as rich in the real thing. Diana Vishneva, Veronika Part, Daria Pavlenko, Zhanna Ayupova, Sofia Gumerova, Irina Golub (never mind that more than half these women are soloists, not principals). Coursing arabesques, beautiful feet, tight fifths, eloquent backs, legs raised and held like broadswords. The women, to a one, are completely pulled up in the spine, but with gravity, peace, in the shoulders (no pinching during the difficult parts, no stiff chins). It is an utterly integrated play between reach and roundness that creates this Kirovian aura of atmosphere, a volumetric glamour that’s like an invisible stole, the night around the moon. When in Don Quixote, Natalia Sologub danced the Queen of the Dryads variation—a big sharp solo that no one can do anymore without jerking adjustments (it’s full of swinging fouettés en tournant and sudden stops)—her freedom within its winging precision was jaw-dropping. She might have been snapping open large linen napkins, then folding them corner to corner, crisp and neat. The house roared, as if to say, “so after all, it can be done.”

The Kirov debuted Jewels back in 1999 in Russia, took it to London in 2000, and first performed it in America last February at the Kennedy Center. So it’s been a winding path to the Big Apple. To see the company in this looming Balanchine after nine days of story ballets was to see them with nothing on but their dancing. And what a sight.

Balanchine choreographed Jewels in 1967, three years after NYCB moved from City Center to the State Theater at Lincoln Center. It was meant to be a big ballet that would fill the big new stage that was now the company’s home. Did Balanchine ever imagine Jewels would be danced across the plaza at the Met, on a stage that makes the State Theater’s look small? When the curtains opened on that deep, high, wide wash of soft green light, a cascade of gems swirling on the cyclorama as if shaken from a jeweler’s pouch in Heaven, one’s first thought was, it’s like a hole in the universe, a vast outer space. This set was based on the original Jewels set, which was later redesigned; the current NYCB set has gems pasted on the cyc like a necklace laid flat. The difference in these sets, a fantasy of glittering riches from on high versus a glowing abstraction, is indicative of the differences in performance. Where City Ballet dances the three sections of Jewels (Emeralds, Rubies, Diamonds) as a state of mind, a multifaceted meditation on one theme—the tension between the quest and the capture—the Russians are attuned to fantasy. It’s as if they’re in a Balanchine theme park, a starry Disneyland romance of Fauré’s France, Stravinsky’s America, and Tchaikovsky’s Russia—panoramas filled with fabled creatures.

It’s intoxicating, the Kirov splendor in Jewels. Not only did they dance every step, they danced in a way that would have had Balanchine beaming—not because they move like Balanchine dancers (they don’t) but because the dancing is so rich and full and listening and large. Veronika Part, the company’s Ava Gardner lookalike, voluptuous yet slim, luxuriant yet light, was a kind of milkmaid princess in the second lead of Emeralds. She filled the stage. In Rubies, Diana Vishneva shook it up like dice. This is a dancer who can do anything technically, but sometimes gets pulled off course by her own strong will (her Tuesday night Bayadère was an unguided missile, white heat, out of control). But Rubies is about will, and Vishneva gets it in a big way, treating us to a one-woman Broadway show—Guys and Firebirds. Hers was one of those giddy performances in which virtuosity, all cylinders firing, reads as wit and the audience just grabs on for the ride. Rubies as roller coaster! My husband, having spotted the NYCB director Peter Martins in the audience, said, “I bet he’s poppin’ a cold sweat.”

I did not care for Svetlana Zhakarova, who had the opening night Diamonds. She is all extremes, with trick limbs that make one think of Sylvie Guillem, and a gluey plasticity that robs her dancing of spontaneity, accent. It doesn’t help that she misses the mood swings in the music. Sofia Gumerova gave a persuasive reading on Saturday night, skating high on the icy surface of Diamonds, a City Ballet display of swoop and scale. But it was Daria Pavlenko, Friday night, who was the sensation.

Pavlenko is a beauty, with a face of Art Deco exoticism, as if drawn by Erté. Though offstage she’s small as a mosquito, onstage she reads tall and has an endless line that could have come as well from Erté’s pen. But she doesn’t overplay that line. Pavlenko is one disciplined dancer, and she brings her own hushed momentum to the stage, an awesome technique that is flush with dignity, and music. Her Diamonds was all about hearing—the horns in the distance, the woodwinds rising, her own beating heart. She gave us plunges of emotion in steps wholly performed. Her fourth positions on stork points—huge and deeply crossed—were displays of majestic chiaroscuro. Her sous-sus, tight as a top, were star bright and absolutely still (“at the still point, there the dance is”). And her arabesque—a gleam, a comet’s tail. In everything Pavlenko did she was thrilling. But this, after all, is what a ballerina must be.

So what would Mr. B think of how seriously the Kirov takes certain formalities, how new-minted this makes the ballet look? That I can’t guess. But the pas de trois in Emeralds, which the Kirov danced like three young purebreds trained and reined together—it was delight every time, an emperor’s entertainment. And the four boys in Rubies—their uniformity of accent! They held formation like four wheels on a roadster, and revved up together like Hell’s Angels at a stop sign. I loved the way they drove through. And the corps and courtiers in Diamonds! Under a blast of white light, and in white satin and tulle, the finale becomes a white act of its own, a union between two companies, a cosmic connection—“what might have been and what has been.” This court climax is an evocation of the St. Petersburg of Balanchine’s dreams—snowbound palaces and Tolstoyan balls. To see it danced here by the company of those dreams, and with such inborn symmetry and ascendance, it was like standing in the wings with Balanchine and seeing what he once saw.

It would be easy to use Kirov dancing as a stick with which to hit New York ballet companies. The Kirov arrived at the end of an ABT spring season of tired repertory, undistinguished (because one-dimensional) dancing, and too many principal women pushed beyond their talent (or unable to give because so unguided). It doesn’t help that over at NYCB, a company bred for stylistic coherence, I saw a Vienna Waltzes in which the dancers were having trouble waltzing, let alone waltzing as one. And even among the most gifted young women at City Ballet, the dancing has gotten too thin, too divorced from fantasy, coquetry, poetry, love. This is why the company can’t successfully cast a ballet like Mozartiana, a reliquary of all Balanchine believed in, a last masterpiece choreographed for Suzanne Farrell. The above-mentioned properties are each implicit in this ballet, and it is blind ideology to think they’re not. It is also well to remember that Farrell, while rather bare branches up top, had a whorling volume from the belly down, a ripple effect that filled the eye and flooded the stage.

What we’re seeing now is an odd reverse. Almost twenty years after Balanchine’s death in 1983, we can’t ride his coattails with such superiority. Our companies are in the same boat as the Kirov—no living choreographer of genius—but unlike the Kirov, our directors can’t seem to bring up new ballerinas, at least not in such blissful batches. And where the Kirov has all of Balanchine to explore, so many NYCB dancers look all stretched out in him, with no place to go. And yet we continue to condescend, with the bean counters pointing out which step the Russians did wrong, which pose was not held long enough—missing, in the chance to wag a finger, the forest for the twig—and the village explainers trotting out Cold War clichés for a new generation, nonsense like: Russians go from pose to pose; or, Russians do squatty preparations for pirouettes (not true anymore, but everyone does a noticeable prep when it’s built into the score, even Balanchine dancers). And here’s one: if the Kirov watches us enough they’ll learn how to dance. Actually, maybe it’s time for us to watch them.

Nestled within those three Jewels was a Saturday matinée Swan Lake. I dread Swan Lake these days—you almost never see much company connection to the work any more, or imaginative thrill in the dancing. The search for relevance—with settings in different eras, or sexy new gender transpositions—is often little more than hip subversion or a marketing ploy (or both), a way to whip up interest for next year’s subscription series. The staging presented by the Kirov, however, was standard Sergeyev, with no outlandish interpolations or outré sets. Just a Saturday matinée Swan Lake.

After the curtain came down on Act II, I walked up the aisle for intermission and felt something strange—contentment. The pas de trois, which dancers usually treat as a career move, all forced and flashy, was danced by Scherbakov, Sologub, and Ekaterina Osmolkina with such faultless plush and gracious phrasing that it really did feel like a toast to civilized pleasures. And Veronika Part—it wasn’t a showstopping Odette, but a fascinating one. That heavy lightness of hers, so appropriately sinking into a dream in Emeralds, was here a voluptuous problem to be solved, a wreath of languor from which to break free. Part’s bust, plumy feminine flesh in the manner of Sargent’s Madame X, seemed the stronghold of her mystery. She spoke with breast and back, plunging, twisting in her bodice—Odette as deep décolletage.

After Act III, again a daze of wonder. The national dances, in which we look so faux, were riveting, because the dancers know how to perform a czardas, a mazurka, how to toss their heads and wear their gloves and slide a foot on the floor as if slitting open a letter with it. In Russia it’s their job to know these things. (The former Kirov dancer Vadim Strukov, an acclaimed character dancer, says of the mazurka, “it takes eight years in school to learn it. You work on it like a dog, and then you get to the theater and they still might not let you do it.”) And Part, she ate space as Odile, charging the stage, legs reaching like a racehorse, and her arabesques unfurling with a swift mass that seemed to pull her back and away from her heart’s desire, a complex physics I’ve never seen before. In my daze I ran into the Ballet Review critic Don Daniels, who spoke of Part’s lower center of gravity, and how it offered a range of movement properties—centrifugal pleasures—we don’t get from our lighter, more linear dancers. Yes. Pleasures of pull, not push, the tide inhaling under the waves. Here was a compleat Swan Lake, meticulously prepared from the corps up, every curve in alignment, the elements understood, a world created by the latitudes and longitudes of classical technique, and Odette bound in that net, its queen.