Spartacus
It’s too bad that the recently restored Russian film of Spartacus, with music by Aram Khachaturian and choreography by Yury Grigorovich, will only be shown twice as part of the Dance on Camera Festival 2008 at the Walter Reade Theater in NYC. Filmed in 1975, the film’s recent restoration is a reminder—for those of us in the west, as well as the current generation of Russians—of the glory days of the Bolshoi Ballet in the Soviet-era. This is dancing like we haven’t seen in a long time.
If you don’t know that Bolshoi means big, watching the curtains separate clear to the edges of the Reade’s luxurious wide screen is only the beginning. Grigorovich’s 1968 choreography is well suited for the medium, with epic scenes of massed soldiers tearing into battle and intricate visual rhythms that play between soloists and corps. There are, however, annoying edits, horrific continuity problems and hokey close-ups of the dancers looking heroic mid-variation, but the Bolshoi performances of the ballet’s four stars are staggering.
We know who each of them is by the way he or she moves. Maris Liepa’s teeth-gnashing villain exudes the power of the Roman state with every weighted step, and Natalya Besmertnova dances with a sublime phrasing that is the manifestation of love. Nina Timofeyeva is nothing less than astonishing. Watching her, I remembered what jumping is. Yet she does not jump to be in the air—she is a whore, not in the usual tired, vampish way. It is sexual power that propels her. But Vladimir Vasilyev, in the title role, carries the day—and the film. His smallest movement has texture, and while he leaps and turns (to the left) with heroic abandon, it is the integrity of his character that melts the heart.
Midway through, the film goes into a sort of fugue state when hordes of male dancers mass and hurl themselves into the air beneath a glowering sky. Rapid perspective changes and multiple exposures double their numbers, and again and again Spartacus leaps over them until finally in slowest motion, we see the hero soaring above defeat. It’s way over the top, but it is glorious. See it if you can—especially on a wide screen.
