TILTING AT STARDOM NADINE BATOEVA & IEVA RACENE SET BALTIC ALIGHT

BY SIMON HEWITT

JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS I attended two in Riga and St Petersburg. One was memorable for the lead dancer, one wasn’t.

One – not surprisingly, given the time of year – was , which I first saw in Paris conducted by Valery Gergiev. The grotesque kitsch of the set and costumes, by the French-based Non-Conformist artist Mikhail Chemyakin, complemented Gergiev’s iconoclastic reading of ‘one of the most tragic scores Tchaikovsky ever composed’ – with Masha, the ballet’s youthful heroine, portrayed as a social outcast unable to face reality. Perhaps her predicament was a metaphor for Tchaikovsky’s socially taboo homosexuality – said to have prompted his suicide just eleven months after The Nutcracker ’s Mariinsky première in December 1892. Musically, the ballet’s tragic mood was symbolized by the introduction of the recently invented celesta, which Tchaikovsky (and Mahler) would both use as the twinkling sound of death in their tragic Sixth Symphonies.

But I digress. The disturbing ambiguity of Gergiev’s Nutcracker is, of course, totally at odds with its traditional status as a Kiddies’ Christmas Treat – of the kind I saw in Riga in late November. Two little girls were leaning excitedly out of the box above me, at their first live encounter with classical music, which I hope bequeathed them happy memories.

My own memories, at least of Act One, concern two troupe members almost as well-formed as the tutu’d hippopotami in Fantasia . I nearly left at the interval, but fortunately the Riga Opera has a magnificent basement café, full of brass lamps and gleaming wooden chairs, so I had a drink. Good job too. Ieva Rācene was up next.

This would prove to be one of those rare occasions when the lead ballerina is left for dead by a member of her supporting cast. Riga’s Masha danced neatly, and got some height into her jumps – but it was a two-performance Sunday, and it looked as if she had already been through a gruelling matinee.

Ieva imbued her seven-minute cameo as the smouldering heroine of the Arabian Dance with enough mystique and haughty sensuality to set pulses racing for the entire winter: an achievement all the more remarkable in that she spent much of the time borne aloft by two slaves, maintaining her back ramrod straight while performing hand and arm movements of beguiling complexity before emerging from their adoring clutches with elverine elasticity. (To sample Ieva’s unique blend of poise and erotic cool, see this video of her dancing to the haunting music of Vivaldi’s contemporary Alessandro Marcello: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TxjWL8lpjM.)

Three weeks later in St Petersburg I saw , a staple of the Russian ballet repertoire which I first encountered in the unlikely setting of the Palace of Congresses inside the Kremlin, where apparachiki used to plenum together beneath Lenin’s benevolent gaze. I had a nice seat halfway-back in the stalls, about 60 yards from the stage. The ballet’s folksy charm was rather lost in the 6,000-seater auditorium (much used as an alternative venue during the Bolshoi’s six-year rebuilding programme).

At the Mariinsky, however, I was in a box level with the orchestra pit – close enough to hear the pitter-patter of dainty feet, and admire a lead ballerina who did not just live up to her billing but leapt right over it. Nadezhda Batoeva interpreted the female lead with such irresistible joie de vivre that you felt Carmen had donned tights. At the end of this firecracker performance you expected to exit the Mariinsky into Rio mid-Carnival rather than the St Petersburg slush.

Apart from the vainglory of tilting at windmills, there is nothing tragic about Minkus’ Don Quixote – the only ballet whose eponymous hero clunks around the stage with a straggling Uncle Sam beard. Although peppered with amusing interludes starring the deluded Don, t he ballet – conceived by in the late 1860s – does scant justice to Cervantes, concentrating instead on the romantic shenanigans of an innkeeper ’s daughter called Kitri. Nadine ’s interpretation combined intricate pointe -work with outrageous leaps and an elegant lesson in the wristy art of fan-fluttering – all with effortless gusto. *

One of the advantages of social media, for a journalist, is the chance to circumvent PR people. If I had gone through the ‘official channels,’ I am sure it would have taken days to obtain a reply from the opera-house press offices, then weeks to make contact with Ieva or Nadine.

So I tracked them down on facebook and asked for an interview.

To my delight and amazement, both replied within a couple of hours, and both said Yes. But there was a but. Ieva was about to fly off to Kyrgyzstan, while Nadezhda (‘Nadine to my friends’) told me she ‘would be happy to give an interview, but I have rehearsals tomorrow, and do not have time to cancel.’

Alas. A prima ballerina cancelling a Mariinsky rehearsal on my behalf!

So we conducted our interviews by e-mail. I said I would be happy for replies to be in Russian, but both wrote back in English. Ieva has spent time in the USA and declares herself ‘fluent in Russian and English.’ Nadine told me she ‘hesitates to speak English, because my English is not perfect.’ She was being excessively modest. ‘And I want to study French!’ she added.

Enthusiasm for languages is typical of stars of the classical music profession – especially, in my experience, those from Eastern Europe.

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Neither girl hails from a background that destined them for a career in dance. Both were born in modest towns, grew up in big cities and are now in their mid-twenties.

Nadine Batoeva began life in Neryungri, a Siberian new-town (population 60,000) halfway between Lake Baikal and the Pacific, where her parents were on temporary work assignment. A couple of years later they moved back to Volgograd, where Nadine began to study dance by accident. Her three elder brothers had just been dispatched to start dance classes by their exhausted mother. ‘When the teacher saw me lurking in the hallway’ recalls Nadine ‘she invited me to join in.’ She was five.

She loved the lessons, but they had nothing to do with classical ballet – which Nadine first encountered at the age of 9, when her mother took her for an audition at the Vaganova Ballet Academy in St Petersburg. She passed with flying colours and was soon studying under the venerable Ludmila Safronova. She was awarded the Hope of Russia Prize in 2008 and joined the Mariinsky after graduat ing in 2009 – working under 70 year-old Galina Kekisheva who, like Safronova, had been taught by the great Agrippina Vaganova (1879-1951), who had danced under the same Marius Petipa whose Don Quixote, encapsulating 150 years of Russian ballet tradition, I saw Nadine perform. (It is a wondrous paradox that, for half of that period, tradition was guarded by a Communist regime for whom tradition in every other walk of life was a dirty word.)

Performing at the Mariinsky was and remains her dream – ‘my favourite theatre in the world.’

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Ieva was born in 1990 in the small Latvian town of Cēsis (population 18,000) but spent her childhood ‘moving around the country’ before settling in Riga in 2001. She began dancing soon afterwards, at the age of 11. ‘I was always hyper-active. Dancing and acting were always somewhere inside me.’

Initially she concentrated on rhythmic gymnastics and ballroom dances like the Quickstep or Cha-cha-cha. But her teachers thought her ‘unusually supple and with a great sense of rhythm’ – and destined for better things. So they suggested she apply for the Riga Choreography School. Ieva had never danced ballet in her life but sailed through the entrance exam. ‘My love for ballet,’ she adds, ‘came about while I was learning it.’

Her first ballet teacher was Inita Saleniece then, for the next five years, Rita Harlapa. Ieva describes both as ‘incredibly talented, with very high standards – they worked us hard!’ She took time out in 2006 to attend classes at the Gregory Hancock Dance Theatre in Indiana, and in 2009 won a Silver Medal at the Concours International de Danse Classique in Grasse. She joined the Latvian National Ballet in 2010 after impressing Artistic Director Aivars Leimanis with her end-of-year graduation performance. She won the Latvijas Gāze Award as Best Ballet Soloist for the season 2012/13.

Ieva’s breakthrough rôle was Desdemona in Othello , choreographed by ‘the amazing Alla Sigalova’ to music by Bach and the 20 th century composers Iannis Xenakis and Avet Terterian. Desdemona remains the most difficult rôle she has performed, ‘above all mentally. Physically I can manage to get through difficulties; mentally it is much harder.’ I then asked her to identify the greatest technical challenges of ballet-dancing. I half- expected a brush-off or curt reply. But Ieva launched into a disarming bout of self- criticism: ‘Probably precision technique like small jumps and pirouettes – because I’m tall, and long muscles takes longer to react; the co-ordination and muscle-work are a bit different. I need really to train my torso, because in my case it is large; it is easier to turn quickly with a compact body.’ Her aim, she continued, ‘is to be better than I was yesterday – to get higher and higher, and to understand more and more about dance, art and how to convey that to people so they can understand what I’m saying when I dance.’

Her preferred rôles are those where she ‘can tell a story – rôles that are full of emotion and interesting movements.’ She cites her Courtesan in Prokofiev’s Romeo & Juliet and Carabosse (the wicked fairy godmother) in Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. What she most enjoys about ballet is ‘being on stage, training all the time, and having a strong body.’

Her favourite ballets are modern: Krzysztof Pastor’s Carmen , Boris Eifman’s Anna Karenina , and she ‘loves choreographies by the Czech Jiří Kylián (born 1947).’ She invariably cites the choreographer before the composer. She received a remarkable accolade in 2014 when Argentine choreographer Demis Volpi created the one-act ballet Elegy , to music by Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks, specifically for her. She has since danced it nearly a dozen times.

Her favourite piece at the Latvian National Ballet, however, is Images of Presence – a one- act ballet conceived by Elza Leimane, the company’s principal dancer (and daughter of Aivars Leimanis).

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Like Ieva, Nadine enjoys ‘living out different stories’ – as you can tell from this sizzling Russian TV recording of her ‘Dance of the Etruscans’ from Spartacus (www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlmW-Th1z-E) .

Her other favourite rôles include Cinderella to Alexei Ratmansky’s choreography; the trio in Alexei Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH to the music of Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto (which she next performs at Mariinksy 2 on March 19); Presentiment of Spring (music by Lyadov) with choreography by Yuri Smekalov; and Le Parc , a 1994 ballet (with music by Mozart) by Angelin Preljoçaj (born 1957), the French choreographer of Albanian origin.

Kitri in Don Quixote is ‘the most fun,’ while the rôle she would most like to dance in the future is .

The most difficult rôle Nadine has danced is the 3rd movement ( Allegro Vivace ) from George Balanchine’s choreography to Bizet’s Symphony in C (originally known as Le Palais de Cristal ).

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When asked to name their favourite composer, both mention figures from the 20 th century. Nadine likes Prokofiev: ‘Every time I listen to his music I find something new.’ Ieva cites the Max Richter (born 1966) and Argentine tango composer Astor Piazzolla (1921-92). Tango suits Ieva’s cerebral sensuality; there is more of the Flamenco about Nadine.

Both also love rock music, sharing a passion for U2. Nadine also likes the English band Keane and Russian singer Zemfira. Ieva is a ‘huge fan of Freddy Mercury’ and also listens to American rock bands Bon Jovi and Aerosmith (a passion she shares with Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite) – a long with ‘all kinds of jazz, soul and blues music.’

Both travel extensively and enjoy it. Nadine’s favourite cities are Los Angeles and, perhaps not surprisingly, Rio de Janeiro. By way of polite contrast she adds Edinburgh and London. Ieva loves Spain and the South of France as she ‘can’t stand the cold for long, even in Latvia!’ On her recent trip to Bishkek, for an International Gala at the Stalin- era Opera House organized by Kyrgyz ballet star Marat Sydykov, she performed a pas de deux from Giselle and a neo-classical piece by Elza Leimane. There was no time for sight- seeing but she relished the ‘really friendly culture.’

When I asked about their interests outside dancing, Nadine replied ‘Jewellery’ (she dreams of becoming a jewellery designer one day), while Ieva mentioned ‘Science & Technology,’ adding: ‘I’m really interested in how everything works and what will come next – what kind of transport we will have, what kind of treatments scientists will discover. I’m hungry for everything new.’

Ieva is currently rehearsing the title rôle in a new production of Scheherazade created by the Leo Mujić, incorporating music by Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály. It premières in Riga on April 8.

This March will see Nadine dance in , Romeo and Juliet (as Juliet) and La Bayadère – as well as Concerto DSCH . She’s back as Kitri at the Mariinsky on April 15.

Sell-outs assured.