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.