Last week, Natalia Osipova was snapping her fan and fluffing her petticoats as the most sublime, firecracker Kitri of her generation. This week, she is pumped up in Lycra and jazz shoes, an aerobics princess setting the pace of Twyla Tharp's In the Upper Room. Osipova's range is quite remarkable for a dancer who is just 21. But if she is a rare talent in her own right, she is also the face of the new Bolshoi.
Under the direction of Alexei Ratmansky, the Moscow-based company has blossomed almost beyond recognition. Not only has it begun performing its signature story ballets with an arresting attention to detail, it has also been pushing its repertory into very challenging new terrain, the results of which can be seen in this current triple bill of one-act works.
Asaf Messerer's Class Concert, created in 1962, is not new to the company. But it has been decades since the Bolshoi felt inclined to expose itself in this 40-minute showcase of pure danse d'école. Now, in Mikhail Messerer's meticulous revival, the company's collective technique is on proud display, and all of the ranks rise to the occasion with dancing that is impressively clean, buoyant and fast.
It is from this classical bedrock that the Bolshoi has set out to tackle the two more radical works in the programme. Christopher Wheeldon's Elsinore is set to Arvo Part's Symphony No 3 and, inspired by the music's grandly melancholic rhetoric, evokes the spiritual zeitgeist of Shakespeare's Hamlet. There is no storytelling as such; Wheeldon creates a series of solos and duets in which states of dislocation, uncertainty and yearning are built into the choreography. Hands circle through empty air; the language of partnering is slippery and evasive. Even though Wheeldon is careful to accommodate the Bolshoi's strengths, juicing up key variations with big jumps and pirouettes, he also has the dancers articulating their bodies with a subtle, shifting expressiveness that is an entirely new idiom for them.
Tharp's In the Upper Room is a much more obvious proposition, a jazz and ballet marathon set to the turbo-charged minimalism of Philip Glass. The choreography requires a splintering speed of response, a rhythmic dexterity and street-smart aplomb that are taxing for any company. Osipova glitters, but there are many others in the Moscow cast who are not far behind.
· The Bolshoi's London season ends this Saturday. Box office: 0870 145 0200.
