Spit and Polish, Braids and Boots

By Michael Walsh

Fluttering, whirling, and otherwise kicking up their heels, the 95 dancers of the Moiseyev Dance Company blew into Manhattan last week, as bracing as a shot of Stolichnaya on a midwinter Moscow evening. Almost a half-century old, the venerable Soviet folk troupe was back in the U.S. for the first time in a dozen years. Their three-month, 16-city tour is a prominent part of the cultural exchange program re-established at the 1985 Geneva summit that so far has weathered the always mercurial, adversarial relationship between the superpowers.

Tear gas too. On opening night, just as the dancers were starting a coy mating dance called Summer, the sellout audience at the Metropolitan Opera House was routed by a cloud of noxious gas that emptied the 4,000-seat auditorium and forced cancellation of the performance. (The radical Jewish Defense League at first claimed and then denied responsibility.) Next evening, amid beefed-up security, the show went off without a hitch.

A drill team in Moldavian mufti, all spit and polish in braids and boots, the company has raised folk dancing to a highly regimented, breathtakingly athletic art form. Drawing inspiration from the more than 100 different ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, but predominantly Russian in personnel and outlook, the company remains the personal expression of its founder, Choreographer Igor Moiseyev, 80.

The conflicts of cultural politics may come and go, but the Moiseyev troupe is still stepping smartly through the pastoral frolic of Polyanka (a small meadow), the gentle gibes of the Old City Quadrille and the patriotic harum- scarum of Partisans, signature pieces all. Even the newer works on the program -- the dazzling, how-do-they-do-that At the Skating Rink and the wackily erotic Night on Bald Mountain -- show the same disciplined panache familiar to Americans from earlier visits.

At their best, the Moiseyev dancers offer a kinetic excitement that ought to be the envy of dance companies everywhere. The bodies are lithe, handsome and superbly conditioned, without a saggy, stereotypical babushka in sight, and they move through Moiseyev's short, repetitive kaleidoscopic patterns with elan and assurance. The headstands, the five-foot leaps, the tumbles and twirls are unfailingly impressive, and the music, a wildly eclectic pastiche of Soviet folk songs, Strauss waltzes and Mussorgsky tone poems, rattles along briskly under the baton of Conductor Anatoli Gusj.

Some of the effects are startling. In Partisans the dancers impersonate wartime equestrian irregulars, without benefit of horses. In At the Skating Rink they gambol and glide along imaginary ice in a skaters' waltz of rare beauty. Typically, the narrative is minimal, the political content low; for the Moiseyev, the steppe's the thing. Whether miming a cavalry charge or approximating the flight of eagles in a Kalmuck ceremony, the company attacks each number with ramrod backs and bright faces, precise and impeccable.

All the technique, though, is an end in itself; the characters are largely cliches (ardent swains, shy maidens, puff-chested popinjays, reeling drunks), and of genuine emotion there is scarcely a sign. No self-respecting Tartar could be as passionless as this. For most of the program, the Moiseyev is as impersonal as the production line at a Ukrainian tractor factory.

Until, that is, Night on Bald Mountain. In its 1961 tour, the Moiseyev brought P.S.: Surprise Encore!, an exaggerated effort to satirize American rock 'n' rollers. That work's time has passed, but the impulse that inspired it remains. In Bald Mountain, Mussorgsky's music is suddenly interrupted by a prolonged cadenza of what can only be called socialist jazz jungle drumming. Pairs of pig-snouted satyrs and lissome succubi writhe lustily as syncopated kettledrums accompany an orgy of things that go bump and grind in the night. The outburst is as unexpected as it is finally gratuitous. But after an evening of demure wholesomeness, it makes a welcome, rowdy change.