I told you I was going to last February. But I didn’t do it. Watching Veronika Part and Roberto Bolle’s emotional performance in Ratmansky’s Symphony No.9 made me think of Inna Borisovna. To start with, Zubkovskaya was Part’s senior teacher at the Vaganova Academy. But more in a moment.
Perhaps what made their emotional tenor so right was that the work wasn’t something expressionist, like a MacMillan ballet, and so what they did couldn’t seem excessive. They weren’t hyping what starts off already superheated. The overall tone of the ballet was intentionally, or at least ostensibly ironic, and a little flippant in the Ratmansky manner. On the other hand, what they seemed to be doing was unlocking the potential of the work; I didn’t feel that they were imposing something inappropriate.
It was very interesting for me to watch a tape of Zubkovskaya rehearsing Nikiya with a Japanese company in late 1994-early 1995, when she and several ex-Kirov colleagues made a couple of trips to prepare the company’s Bayadere. (I’ll find the tape again and give you the company’s name later.) As Zubkovskaya demonstrated acting parts of the role, what was clear– and this relates to the Wendy Whelan Seven Deadly Sins performance that originally sparked my Zubkovskaya citation–was how potent the positions and attitudes were inherently, shown perfectly by the 70-plus-year-old ex-ballerina. How she actually performed these poses and stances on stage I can’t say with any first-hand knowledge. I think that Zubkovksaya herself was considered a rather cool and very beautiful ballerina until she began to work with choreographer Leonid Jacobson in her late-20s, which would be around 1950.
A Mariinsky ballerina told me that after a Swan Lake she’d danced before Zukovskaya died in 2001, she complained about pirouettes that didn’t work, and Zubkovskaya corrected her, telling her that it didn’t matter; the performance was successful because she had conveyed something meaningful to the audience. . .
Zubkovskaya died in 2001; I interviewed her in New York in 1999. As far as movement is concerned, it was interesting to watch her make her way to the front row of the Mariinsky, where ex-stars were traditionally given seats in perpetuity.
But so often ballet dancers think the more emotion they generate within themselves, the more impact they make on the audience. Not necessarily true, and perhaps a little more belief in the acting lexicon itself might help. Doing more sometimes achieves less.