E-Mail This Article to a Friend Where modern ballet all started? The Kirov brings Fokine to Boston BY IRIS FANGER

The Kirov Ballet, mother of all ballet troupes, opens at the Wang Theatre next Thursday night, bringing nearly 90 dancers and 65 musicians of the Kirov Orchestra to Boston. Based in St. Petersburg at the Mariinsky Theatre, with a company history dating back more than 250 years, the Kirov not only is one of the premier artistic attractions of Russia but numbers among the cultural wonders of the world.

Only one program, out of a repertory packed with treasures, will be presented over the weekend — a mixed bill of one-act works by Mikhail Fokine that brought instant celebrity to Serge Diaghilev’s fabled Ballets Russes, the conduit for the Russian ballet tradition to the West before World War I. The Kirov will revisit that era with Chopiniana (better known as Les Sylphides), Schéhérazade, and The Firebird, which premiered in 1910 with a score by a youthful Igor Stravinsky. On opening night, November 13, the evening will also include The Dying Swan, the eight-minute solo that Fokine made for Anna Pavlova in 1905 that became her emblem, and Le Spectre de la Rose, one of Vaslav Nijinsky’s signature roles. One mustn’t complain, because the Kirov seldom includes Boston on its itinerary when it travels, but it’s a shame that we couldn’t also have Marius Petipa’s 19th-century classic La Bayadère, or George Balanchine’s Jewels, which the company presented earlier on several of the West Coast tour stops, alternating with the Fokine bill.

In any case, we will be getting the beloved ballets that allowed Pavlova, Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina, and other leading dancers to astonish audiences on three continents — Europe and North and South America. These works were tailored for the dancers by Fokine, who had trained with them at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg and performed alongside them in the imperial troupe. The ballets have been revived with the original spectacular sets by Ballets Russes artists Leon Bakst (Schéhérazade and several of the costumes for The Firebird) and Alexander Golovin (The Firebird).

The inheritor of Petipa’s gifts for choreography, Fokine rebelled against the old man’s rigid notions about full-evening ballets that told stories in strictly symmetrical classical patterns. Although he denied her influence, Fokine turned to new ideas about the expressive qualities of dance through natural movement that had first been brought to Russia by Isadora Duncan in 1905. It’s certain we would not have had the experimental works of the Soviet ballet in the early 1920s by Balanchine and others, or the cornucopia of ballets that Balanchine created after he emigrated to America in 1933, without Fokine’s challenge to traditions.

There may not be legendary performers like Pavlova or Nijinsky still among us, but a number of the Kirov performers are among the best of their generation. The feathery-light corps de ballet can be counted on to steal the spotlight in Chopiniana. Some of the principals set for Boston include Uliana Lopatkina, Diana Vishneva, Igor Zelensky, and Leonid Sarafanov, a young first soloist who trained in Kiev and joined the Kirov a year ago and is rumored to be a comer. On opening night, Lopatkina is scheduled (casting is always subject to change) in Schéhérazade as Zobeide, the favorite wife, and in The Dying Swan. Zelensky dances Nijinsky’s role of the Golden Slave in Schéhérazade on November 14. Casting for Vishneva, who was a late addition to the Boston performances, has not yet been announced.

The FleetBoston Celebrity Series and the Wang Center for the Performing Arts present the Kirov Ballet and Orchestra at the Wang Theatre, 270 Tremont Street in the Theater District, November 13 through 16. Tickets are $45 to $90; call (800) 447-7400, or visit www.celebrityseries.org or www.wangcenter.org, or drop in to the Wang Theatre box office.