Diana Vishneva, Mariinsky Ballet (not in Don Quixote)

The Mariinsky Ballet, the St. Petersburg company formerly known as the Kirov Ballet, brought its charming, old production of Don Quixote to Washington this week. Alexander Gorsky’s adaptation of the classic 1869 choreography by Marius Petipa dates back to the first decade of the 20th century, and not much about it has changed since then. Anyone interested in the cutting edge of ballet is unlikely to be much taken with this bit of history, but for the ballet neophyte it would be a grand, agreeable introduction – a light-hearted, at times slapstick ballet in which the only suicide turns out to be fake.

Petipa’s libretto is centered on Kitri, the daughter of a Barcelona innkeeper, a transmutation of Aldonza Lorenzo, the farm girl whom Don Quixote exalts as the legendary love of his life, Dulcinea, in the 1606 novel by Cervantes. The character of el ingenioso hidalgo is relegated mostly to the sidelines, a wistful observer of the love triangle (Kitri, her lover Basil, and Gamache, the man her father wants her to marry) that is the motivating crisis of the plot. It would be difficult to choreograph the character of Don Quixote in any other way, and Petipa does incorporate a couple of the novel’s classic scenarios, including Sancho Panza being bounced on a blanket by ruffians, Quixote attacking the windmill, and his mistaking the puppet show for reality.

What filled the Kennedy Center Opera House last night was the chance to see prima ballerina Diana Vishneva (pictured), who was extraordinary as Kitri. In a bright red costume in Act I, she showed a dramatic, long line en pointe. Her leaps and extensions were smooth and rounded with athletic grace, and her pirouettes aligned on a nearly perfect vertical axis. She was not quite matched by her Basil, Evgeny Ivanchenko, whose lifts began to look a bit shaky by the end of the first act, but his fake suicide in the third act was appropriately way over the top.