How Natalia Makarova changed the ballet world
FORTY years ago, American Ballet Theatre premiered a glittering extravaganza of Indian temple dancers, bejewelled Brahmins, an opium-aided trip to the afterlife and an earthquake watched over by a Buddha as big as a house.
By the time the curtain fell, the ballet landscape had changed.
Natalia Makarova created, directed and starred in that landmark production of ‘La Bayadere.’ It became an ABT staple and eventually entered the repertoires of troupes around the world. As she was first bringing it to the stage, Makarova taught the ABT dancers every step and gesture of the three-hour production, with corps de ballet rookies and the company’s greats alike watching in fear and awe as the world-famous Russian ballerina commanded them to dance bigger, move freer and even breathe with more conviction.
“How I had the guts to do it, I don’t know,” the 79-year-old Makarova says in a rare phone interview from her mountaintop home in California’s Napa Valley.
An icon of the stage, Makarova was beloved for her grandeur and spontaneity, the same qualities that led her, in 1970, to become the first Russian ballerina to escape the Soviets. But she had never put together a full-length ballet. The one she chose – an overhaul of the 1877 original by the great Marius Petipa, who gave the world ‘Swan Lake’ and ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ – had never been seen in the West.
Makarova had nothing to go on but memories and creative fire.
‘La Bayadere’ is a fantasy of ancient India, focusing on the holy devotee Nikiya (the ‘bayadere,’ or temple dancer, of the title), who is loved by battle hero Solor and hated by socially ambitious Gamzatti, daughter of the Raja. Petipa’s original was a lavish spectacle with live animals. Before fleeing from St. Petersburg’s Kirov (now the Mariinsky) Ballet, Makarova had danced a much-reduced version. To restore the original atmosphere and a lost third act, she pored over Petipa archives at Harvard University. She met with designers in Europe. And don’t get her started on the music: She appealed to prePerestroika Soviets for the complete Ludwig Minkus score and got nowhere.
“It was not just a headache,” Makarova says in a deep Russian accent, ‘it was exhausting.’
This is not a woman who is easily exhausted. Makarova, who in 2012 received the Kennedy Centre Honours, works out every day in the dance studio in her St. Helena, California, home, easing the body aches from decades spent tearing across the stage with abandon. In pre-pandemic times, she was often on the road, directing her ‘Bayadere’ and other ballets for companies across the globe. This past winter alone, she staged ‘Bayadere’ for the Norwegian Ballet and supervised a ‘Giselle’ in Stockholm.
In March, Makarova was set to oversee ABT’s ‘Bayadere’ rehearsals in New York when the stayat-home orders came out. Her ballet, and a celebration of its 40th birthday, was to be a highlight of the company’s spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House. ‘Bayadere’s’ anniversary happens to coincide with ABT’s 80th anniversary. Hearts and hopes are broken all over the place. “We were going to have a big hoopla,” ABT artistic director Kevin McKenzie says from his home in Woodstock, New York. He’d scheduled a run of performances of ‘La Bayadere’ ending in a grand finale, with sweet serendipity, on May 21 – the anniversary date - with guest stars Olga Smirnova of the Bolshoi Ballet and Kimin Kim of the Mariinsky. McKenzie was planning other special appearances that night: “I wanted to people the ballet with dancers who were there 40 years ago. I was going to surprise the audience and pull Natasha” – Makarova’s pet name – ‘out to speak to us.’
With the Met season canceled, ABT has posted special “Bayadere” content at abt. org/ abtoffstage, including a video tribute to Makarova and conversations with current artists as well as those involved with the 1980 premiere.
In an art form with a limited supply of the fulllength story ballets that audiences favor, a dazzling new one is a gift of gold. But when ‘La Bayadere’ premiered, it was more of a monumental risk than a sure thing. It was the biggest, most expensive production in ABT history.
Since little was known of the full-length ‘La Bayadere’ in New York or anywhere else in the West before Makarova’s production, critics had some reservations about historical accuracy.
Yet they were generally positive on the ballet’s effect, noting especially the visual splendors – detailed sets by painter PierLuigi Samaritani and costumes by Theoni Aldredge – as well as the strong leading roles and the confidence of Makarova’s vision.
“Although much is arguable, nothing in her staging is tentative or apologetic,” wrote Arlene Croce in the New Yorker, praising the ballet’s ‘consistently engaging grace.’
Audience enthusiasm has meant that the ballet has never left ABT’s repertoire; it’s typically programmed in a cycle of two years onstage, two years off.
Lucia Chase, ABT’s director at the time, asked Makarova to bring forth a new ballet and, the dancer says, gave her “carte blanche.”
That was the easy part.
“I had to direct, see it from the point of view of the audience, then go onstage and dance my steps,” Makarova says.
“And I didn’t have any experience before. The dancers are waiting for you, waiting for the right description. And I had to force myself to find it.”
The ballerina made the bold choice of bringing a complete production of ‘La Bayadere’ to life, she says, “because I wanted to give my experience, my knowledge. When I saw the dancers do contemporary work, they were moving free, with enthusiasm and abundance. But in a tutu, it’s like they had a mental corset.”
“I was lucky to work in Russia with Leonid Yakobson” – the witty, rule-breaking St. Petersburg choreographer – “who was very expressive with the upper body. And I had a kind of flexibility from nature,” she says.
By contrast, the American ballerinas “were afraid to move freely when they put on a tutu,” Makarova says. “Probably because in their schools they didn’t teach expressiveness of the body. Or to be meaningful in the body.”