Chapter 73 – The Saint Petersburg Show
Stirg and Nev wouldn’t know great ballet if it occurred on their kitchen table at home. As far as they knew, if the dancer was wearing a tutu, was muscular between the knees and the waist and skinny everywhere else, and bore an above average quotient of narcissism, then that dancer met the criteria for great ballet. But Gergiev knew great ballet, and he didn’t see any during opening night of the Saint Petersburg production of the lost ballet. He saw crap, along with every other knowledgeable person in the audience, which included the arts press from most major European newspapers and all the major dance magazines and websites. The Stravinsky score was played beautifully by the Mariinsky orchestra, and the choreography by the resident Mariinsky choreographer was fine, but the dancing was crap. All things are relative, so to be fair it must be pointed out that the dancing only was crappy relative to the usual high standard of the Mariinsky first team. Compared to most companies, it was very good. Still, in Stirg’s production, it was crap, and ballet is about the dancing, right?
The Mariinsky Theater was filled with Ministry dignitaries, politicos, wealthy dilettantes, and a lot of Saint Petersburg’s beautiful people. And they all enjoyed their evening. They came to be seen, and they were seen. There also were a small number of ballet geeks who came to every performance, and had done so for years. They traveled around Europe attending ballets, and sat in coffee shops afterwards, critiquing the performance. These folks melded together with the professional critics after the show, made their way to bars and soirees and restaurants, and critiqued the hell out of this one. Wasn’t the Stravinsky music fabulous? Oh, it was. Wasn’t the set design and lighting beautiful? Oh, they were. Weren’t the costumes lovely, and didn’t they convey the feeling of the paintings by the four famous artists? Inimitably. But my god, wasn’t the dancing complete crap?
Gergiev sucked it up after the performance and gave the junior dancers a pep talk. He said they had been placed in a difficult position, everyone in the audience had enjoyed the show, and they had done a good job. He struggled to find a way to tell them, warn them, about the reviews that would begin appearing the next day, and continue for several months. Finally he gave up trying to soft peddle it, and just said, don’t worry about bad reviews, don’t worry about criticism on the Internet, don’t take it personally. Some people are going to ask about the Mariinsky dancing; what happened; where were the senior members of the troupe? That’s all on me, he said, don’t you worry about it.
It hadn’t been fair at all to the junior dancers, but the innocent get thrown in front of the bus, when the bus is filled with politicians. He would try to make it up to them, somehow. That is, if he still worked at the Mariinsky tomorrow morning. He knew he may find himself under the bus, with them.
Stirg and Nev went to the after performance party at the Ministry, thinking everything had gone well. The audience, most of them, had applauded, hadn’t they? They didn’t understand that opening night was not like the other nights, when the audience would consist of regular people. They didn’t know there would be a lot less applause from them. So tonight, they were happy. The lost ballet had indeed been performed first in Russia, and not in Charleston. Stravinsky had been brought home, where he belonged. The honor and the integrity of Russian culture had been preserved from the American luddites.
Nev would have gotten a hint the next morning that all was not well if he had been able to read the headlines of the newspapers stacked on the concierge’s desk. He couldn’t read Russian, but Stirg could, at least a little. When Stirg read the headline, he felt ill. He had gone to bed content, and now he was sick. One headline read, “Mariinsky Babies Up Past Their Bedtime Last Night.” Another read, “Does Stravinsky Deserve This?” A commentator on a morning news show advised fans to save their money for the orchestral CD of the score, because they could see dancing of this quality at their children’s school. The Russians are hard on their artists.
As the reviews piled up in the magazines and on the websites, things got worse. The politicos at the Ministry of Cultural Affairs felt the heat. If the Mariinsky dancers had been kidnapped, why hadn’t their anti-terrorism teams gone over there and kidnapped them back from the fucking Americans? Why had the production gone forward with the second stringers in there? Why not just cancel the production? Why hadn’t the Bolshoi dancers been called back from South American to fill the qualitative void? The armchair quarterbacks came out of the woodwork, second guessing everyone and everything. People much higher up in the Ministry than Gergiev wondered if they would survive, or not. They heard the sound of the bus coming.
Stirg hung around for another day, trying to figure things out. This cultural stuff wasn’t his arena, he was lost in its web, and no one gave a damn that he had brought ten cashier’s checks made out to cash for a million dollars each, and would go home to Charleston with only four of them in his pocket. He didn’t talk much during the flight back. After the meal, which he hardly touched, Nev watched him doodle on a pad of paper. When he went to the lavatory, Nev looked at what he had written. At the top was SABOTAGE THE FUCKS. Then, under that, was: infrastructure, destroy building or power. Under that was: audience, scare them off. And under that was: kidnap, dancers, that June bitch, the musician.
Stirg came down the aisle, and Nev set the pad back on the seat. He took one more look at it to confirm what he had seen. Underlined three times in heavy black ink was: the musician.