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Sarah Frater's rating
Reader rating
Trains: Tube: Leicester Square/Charing Cross 
Phone: 0870145 2200
Never mind the Bolshoi tradition: the famously formal pomp of the Russian company is swept away in a dark, intense Elsinore
Maria Alexandrova and Egor Khromushin
The Bolshoi is famous for its big story ballets, the super-traditional variety like La Bayadère and Don Quixote. They are brilliantly done, and dazzlingly danced, but they are still old-style ballets with pomp, formality and fairytale characters.
And then last night came a mixed bill of new and recent-ish work featuring not swans and princes, but pure dance for its own sake, some of it small-scale, some of it abstract, and all featuring real people, with real emotions, and even an American cheerleader or two.
It's not the sort of ballet you expect from the Bolshoi, whose dancers usually look like aristocrats. Last night they looked like themselves, and even better movers than we know them to be, bold and versatile, and with an emotional frankness that we rarely see.
In the much-anticipated new piece by the Royal Ballet-trained, New York City Ballet-based Christopher Wheeldon, the company looked remade.
Elsinore is a dark, intense ballet, with inky sets and Arvo Pärt's brooding music. It draws on the story of Shakespeare's Hamlet, although Wheeldon hints at the play's themes rather than relays its narrative. The Bolshoi's Dmitri Gudanov plays an unsettled, solitary character who watches from afar. He eyes four dancing couples, who convey romance and sorrow, confusion and despair.
It's said that Wheeldon had to wrestle the Russians before they'd drop their aristocratic airs and dance with psychological honesty. Heaven knows what they made of his request for stillness and asymmetry. Whatever the case, the princes and swans are gone, and instead we see frail, questioning humans.
A cheerier transformation comes with In The Upper Room, by American choreographer Twyla Tharp. It's a so-called sports ballet whose subject is the sheer joy of dancing. The dancers wear trainers and athletic gear, and jog and shimmy to Philip Glass's hypnotic score. On and on they go, in ever more exuberant moves, flirting with us, ballet dancers one minute, cheerleaders the next. All of them dazzled, although Natalia Osipova stole the show with her good humour and technical gee-whizzery.
Plenty more of that in Class Concert, a ballet about a ballet lesson. Made in 1962 by the little-known Asaf Messerer, the Russian piece has a flat start, and the youngest dancers are so thin you wonder if there's a famine in Moscow. But things improve, and by the close you are cheering each dancer as they outdo each other with ever more eye-popping leaps and spins.
• 14 August only. The Bolshoi visit runs until 18 August. Information 0870 145 0200.
www.eno.org/bolshoi
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Unlike a lot of people I've been disappointed by the Bolshoi's visit until last night (14/08) that is and it was immediately obvious why - space! The heavy sets have so far limited the room to dance - Act II of Corsaire being the most glaring example. With an 'open' stage they took flight - the technical thrill of 'Class Concert' left me delightfully exhausted. The intensity of (an admittedly not very interesting) 'Elsinor' showed what a great ballerina Alexandrova is. Finally, while I don't think they have completely mastered the Tharp style, with the honourable exceptions of Osipova and the lad with the cocks-comb hair, the exhilaration of 'Upper Room' was palpable. Please Bolshoi don't shoehorn sets onto an inadequate stage next visit leave those wonderful limbs free to extend and be seen.
- Kjm, London, London
This triple provided a fascinating insight into another side of the Bolshoi's multi-talented dancers. Class Concert began with a roof-raising excerpt from Shostakovitch's rousing Festival Overture and thereafter followed a 'class' from warm-up barre exercises to full blown beaten and flying steps all performed with great applomb and abandon (Vasiliev effortlessly hurling himself into the air or spinning relentlessly was one of many highlights). Class Concert is a later ballet (by some ten years) with the same subject as Harald Landers' Etudes that Festival Ballet (later ENB) did so well and is equally enjoyable as a company showcase and the insight it gives into the rigours of ballet training from an early age. Elsinore plunged us (literally) into a much darker world of gloomy lighting and sombre orchestral writing that was (mostly) baffling with few clear narrative signposts to guide us through its dense emoting: sincerely danced and well-enough made - if sometimes a little derivative in its choreographic invention - but by no means a 'must see again'. Tharpe's Upper Room was performed with immense vigour by its tireless cast to an energetic Phillip Glass score. At its end, it is hard to know whether audience or dancers are the more exhausted.
- Clive Burton, London
