Too many ballet stars embrace contemporary choreography only when they're on their last legs as classical dancers and want to prolong their careers. Not Diana Vishneva.
In performances on local stages by the Kirov Ballet, this 31-year-old Russian ballerina has often displayed her technical brilliance and interpretive daring in time-honored works from the imperial Russian and American neoclassical repertories. But Wednesday, she danced the premieres of three pieces that were created for her in a program titled "Beauty in Motion" (a label conferred on her by Vogue magazine) at the Orange County Performing Artscenter.
Ultimately it matters less that Vishneva and her seven guest dancers (all but one from the Kirov) rack up one triumph, one disaster and one qualified success than that she's staking her stardom on moving ballet and her own artistry into the future. She may be supreme in a tutu, but there's more than one way to dance a swan, as she definitively proves in Moses Pendleton's typically playful and dreamlike "F.L.O.W. (For Love of Women)."
A founder of the hyper-gymnastic Pilobolus Dance Theater and his own Momix company, Pendleton uses recordings by erO One, Lisa Gerrard and Deva Premal to accompany three kinds of movement theater.
Part 1 is a black light spectacle in which disembodied limbs form whimsical shapes -- including that swan. Part 2 finds Vishneva reclining on a mirrored platform, her constant shifts of position creating strange, seductive illusions. Part 3 places her in a silver gown and a large, circular headdress with strings of beads cascading nearly to the floor -- and as she whirls, the beads become a gleaming, ever-changing aura reflecting and magnifying her energy.
These are the only moments on the program qualifying as beauty in motion, for the other choreographers focus on more complex, nervy agendas. Pendleton alone has the gift of being simple and of being theatrical in a way that has nothing to do with bravura. He may not use Vishneva's classical prowess, but he enlists her imagination -- and the audience's. What's wrong with that?
"F.L.O.W." ideally belongs in a much smaller theater, as does Alexei Ratmansky's hopelessly confusing "Pierrot Lunaire," a setting of Arnold Schoenberg's groundbreaking song cycle in which Vishneva and three males initially appear identically dressed but keep changing roles and hats, reflecting the content of the text.
