Nina Ananiashvili and the State Ballet of Georgia opened this festival’s run of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake to a packed and appreciative house tonight, further cementing Nina’s primacy in the world of ballet. Her Odette tonight was fluid and oh, so precise, and never failed to capture a beautiful sense of doomed longing. Her Odile charmed coyly, yet insistently, without giving a hint of the cruel nature of her mission until the flowers hit the floor and Siegfried realizes his mistake. Indeed, such was the difference, I was asked afterwards if those two characters had been danced by the same person!

The depth of precision in Nina’s movement astounds with its ease. Out of that exacting science comes the ability to convey emotion in a manner that transcends any words this poor scribe could spill. It’s a trait she’s passed on to the State Ballet of Georgia, where she is the artistic director. One can sense that demanding exactness throughout the Corps de ballet, in both small groups, and those times when the whole stage fills with a cascading and sure grace.

This reading of Swan Lake casts it as a dream of a dancer, whose artistic director (Rothbart maybe?…) is not quite satisfied with the dancer’s Siegfried… Exhausted after his failures, his dream lands him (as Siegfried…) at the enchanted lake, and the traditional story of the elusiveness of love begins. A dreamlike state pervades the entire production, aided by Viacheslav Okunev’s gorgeously elaborate sets that drew appreciative gasps from the audience as the curtains rose, yet never distracted one from the dancers (who drew plenty of gasps on their own…).

My only concerns about this otherwise splendid production stem from a few moments where I questioned the lighting choices, mostly during scenes at the already dark lake. There was a wardrobe malfunction early on in the corps from which the dancer recovered quite readily. Near the end of the third scene, both Nina and Sergei Filin payed the smallest of prices for their devotion to precision, but within seconds the dream returned.

The orchestra, under the able direction of Zaza Kalmakhelidze, breathed a wispy fire that not only drove the dancers directly towards their intended emotions, but also provided a grounding for this dreamlike state.

Nina Ananiashvili and Sergei Filin will dance these roles again on June 9th (evening performance). The rest of the performances will be taken by other principal members of the company.

And to my company during intermission, a heartfelt thanks!