Dancers Who Make a Chestnut Come Alive 
By JENNIFER DUNNING    March 13, 2006

The audience cheered when the handsome Prince Désiré kissed the beautiful Princess Aurora awake, in the Tchaikovsky Ballet and Orchestra performance of "The Sleeping Beauty" on Saturday night at the Lehman Center in the Bronx. The epitome of 19th-century ballet, "Beauty" is also a rather long-winded, refined retelling of the fairy tale, presented here with the reduced scenic effects of a touring production. But the performers, from Perm in Russia, are not only fine dancers but also terrific storytellers. And they made theatrical magic for the audiences at Lehman and, the night before, at the Tilles Center in Brookdale, N.Y., in "Swan Lake." 

The Long Island performance was the company's East Coast debut, and it was a triumph, though not in the expected way. The newly redecorated Tilles Center is a pretty, people-friendly jewel, but the stage was much smaller than the company had anticipated. Twenty-four medal-deserving swans had to shoulder their way discreetly around one another in the churning finale. But the lovely performers communicated every vivid nuance and bit of poetry in this traditional staging by Natalia Makarova, which includes Frederick Ashton's haunting fourth act. 

The Tchaikovsky dancers have a direct lineage to the Maryinsky (later Kirov) Ballet in St. Petersburg, the cradle of pure classical dancing, whose members were evacuated to Perm during World War II. That was reflected in the overall style of this touring troupe and especially in the dancing of Elena Kulagina as Odette-Odile in "Swan Lake" and of Natalia Moiseeva as Aurora in "Beauty," in a production said to derive from the 1920's Fyodor Lopukhov staging. The Perm women have distinctively lyrical, expressive arms and upper bodies, and Ms. Kulagina's swan wings were liquid. Ms. Moiseeva's Aurora dreamed before she slept, in mesmerizing adagio dancing that integrated that tiresome stunt of a long Rose Adagio balance, briefly held here, into the flow of the choreography and live music. 

The conviction of Soviet ballet dancers once stunned the West. These performers dance with a similar though muted look of engagement, and the two productions provided many small dramatic details that added to the liveliness of the narratives. (Here, the four fiancés were ardent suitors, not the usual bored-looking corps dancers looking worried about sliding wigs.) 

Ms. Moiseeva's Prince Désiré was Sergei Mershin, a buoyant, clear classical dancer who was equally convincing the night before as a boyish Benno who appreciated his pretty companions in the pas de trois. In "Swan Lake," Alexei Tyukov broke the audience's hearts as much as Odette's in his eloquent portrayal of an all too-human Siegfried, returning the next night to soar in the Blue Bird pas de deux, with Yaroslava Araptanova, in a lead cast completed by Natalia Makina as a gracious Lilac Fairy. And a special word should be said for Igor Soloviev's wonderfully imposing Rothbart in "Swan Lake" and Carabosse in "Beauty," in the simplest-seeming but most powerful blend of acting and dancing.