After four weeks of watching the Kirov, it's inevitable that we should examine the last few performances of the Royal Ballet season with rather critical eyes. It was in the light of this comparison that two vignettes in Monday's Swan Lake stood out as symbolising the strongest, and the weakest, links in the British approach to the classics.
The first was William Tuckett as Siegfried's elderly tutor. He improvised a whole comic character study on the sidelines of the main action, plumping two cushions under his bony bottom and fussing himself ready for a doze. The second was Christopher Saunders as Von Rothbart, orchestrating the deception of Siegfried and his court, his gaze glittering with irony and seething with some ancient malevolence. Both performances involved acting of entrancing wit and initiative, and both were performances of which no one at the Kirov could begin to conceive. But then, nobody at the Kirov would bother, because while the British focus on the little things, the Russians are busy concentrating on the grand scheme of the dance.
It's a totally different orthodoxy of style. The Royal want us to believe in the reality of their Swan Lake, which means that all the dancers on stage are busy reacting to everyone else. The Kirov, however, strip the ballet down to a ritual, regarding the steps as a hallowed script to which the dancers submit. This is one good reason why the Kirov's corps de ballet can, on good nights, attain such a perfect unity of style and expression. It's why the Royal's corps - a bunch of flawed individuals - only rarely attain that unity, in the odd fluky moment of grace. And it's why the Royal know exactly how to perform the dramatic realism of MacMillan and Ashton, and why the Kirov don't.
On an individual level, the Russians also aim for a physical grandeur that seems beyond the current generation at the Royal. Every year, the Kirov women get longer, leaner and more eerily extreme in their virtuosity - and some of us feel that there is a loss of music and expressive detail as a result. Yet while there are dancers in the Royal who have far greater tonal and sculptural variety, the downside is a tendency towards sloppiness and smallness.
Miyako Yoshida is a rare British dancer who can be guaranteed never to put a foot wrong, and on Monday she danced a beautiful, lucid Odette/Odile. For a tiny dancer, she performs on a huge scale. But the Kirov's ballerinas have been trained to transmit a sense of immortality. And the Royal's dancing on Monday was definitely of this earth.
