Kirov Opera and Ballet

It all started in St Petersburg three years ago over a late- night glass of brandy. Harvard professor and ballet historian Tim Scholl and Kirov Ballet's director Makhar Vaziev had settled down with something soothing to mull over that night's performance of La Bayadère. The conversation proceeded comfortably to the post-Soviet attitude to restoring the 260-year-old company's classical repertoire. Innocently, Scholl enquired whether Vaziev, in his quest for authenticity, intended to consult the Nicolai Sergeyev notebooks. A blank stare and an open mouth was his reply.

"I was shocked," remembers Scholl. "Clearly Vaziev had no idea what I was talking about.'' Sergeyev, then 41 and a former dancer, was the Imperial ballet-master at the Maryinski Theatre at the time of the Russian Revolution. His hand-written records of 21 of choreographer Marius Petipa's productions left Russia with him in 1917, and ended up in Harvard's archives in 1951 after Sergeyev's death in Nice. "Soviet archival research in an American university during the Cold War would have been humiliating and unthinkable," observes Scholl. "Russia had just forgotten about the notebooks." Scholl quickly filled in the Russian director. "I was delighted," says Vaziev, himself a former dancer with the company.

Of the 21 ballets recorded by Sergeyev, including Esmeralda, La Bayadère and The Nutcracker, the 312 pages containing The Sleeping Beauty were the most comprehensive.

"As well as the notation," explains Scholl, "there are two whole piano scores with notes for rehearsals scribbled all over them.'' Incredibly the rehearsal room in which, the world's greatest classical choreographer Marius Petipa (1818-1910) worked over a century ago, is still in daily use. The Maryinski Studio, with its elegant wrought-iron balcony where the Imperial family sat to watch their favourite dancers practise, is on the fifth floor of the Vaganova Academy in St Petersburg. Anna Pavlova's young successors still take morning class on the wooden floor precisely sloped to match the rake of the Maryinski Theatre's stage.

Sergeyev, then the company's director, responded to Soviet politically correct diktats that demanded psychological dance dramas, not bourgeois fairy tales. "Because he was told the mimed storytelling would be incomprehensible to proletarian audiences," explains Scholl, "Sergeyev cut them out and thus destroyed the ballet's dramatic flow.''

The Kirov authorities are bashful about the current cost of mounting the new production of a work regarded as the touchstone of the Russian repertoire. In 1890, The Sleeping Beauty was the most expensive ballet ever produced. That casting called for 200 dancers; next week at the Opera House the Kirov Ballet is fielding a "skeleton" team of 157 for its three-hour 35-minute production. This includes 32 first-year students from the Vaganova Academy, who are being given their first sight of London thanks to British school timetables, which makes local recruitment of young dancers impossible. The children from St Petersburg will bring the number of Kirov corps de ballet dancers in the famous Act I Garland Waltz alone to 72, which makes our own Royal Ballet muster of 88 dancers overall seem modest in the extreme.

Four hundred pairs of shoes were delivered last week to the Opera House. This may sound a considerable number, yet the financial strictures on Russian ballet are keenly illustrated by the five pairs of pointe shoes allocated to Diana Vishneva who will dance the opening performance of The Sleeping Beauty next week. At any one time a Royal Ballet ballerina, such as Darcey Bussell, would have a minimum of 20 pairs at her disposal.

"But the big problem was the costumes," remembers Scholl. There are many original sketches and contemporary photographs from which to copy the 500 costumes, but today's dancers are a good five inches taller than their Imperial forebears.

"The most difficult thing for today's dancers," says Vaziev, "who have known this ballet intimately from the age of 10, was to go into the familiar with a completely new approach." The five senior Kirov ballerinas walked out of the Maryinski Theatre in protest against the changes just as the first dress rehearsal began. "But," says Scholl, "everybody now agrees it's not so much what has been jettisoned, but what has been preserved. When a great dancer like Altynai Asylmuratova takes her wealth of experience back to the choreographic roots, the result is sensational.

"The big surprise for me," he adds, "was discovering how Petipa harmonised all the elements of movement, music, design and drama into one gorgeous spectacle, something for people to savour. That's what I call genius.''