Most 45-year-old ballerinas would be on their last legs, but you wouldn’t know it to look at Ananiashvili, who made her Boston debut in 1988, as part of the Soviet-American “Making Music Together” festival. (She returned in 1990 to dance in Boston Ballet’s “glasnost” Swan Lake.) She’s always been a voluptuous, sensuous dancer, waiting on the music and weighting her movements. In her Dying Swan (which Fokine made for Pavlova in 1907, not the program’s 1905), she seemed to be Odette reaching out to an absent Siegfried — unlike, say, the Mariinsky Ballet’s Uliana Lopatkina in this piece, she never looks to be dancing alone. The audience’s applause was evidence that it got what it came for.
Related:
Scenes from the city, Not quite Nina, Tragic tropes and anti-tropes, More 
- Scenes from the city
I missed more things in two and a half days last week than I managed to take in, so whatever I might infer about dance in the New York vortex could have come out a different way if I’d reversed my priorities.
- Not quite Nina
On hearing the opening notes of the Kronos Quartet composition and seeing the dancers lit in sunny yellow, I feared we were about to be subjected to one of those “up with people” ballets.
- Tragic tropes and anti-tropes
The only question to ask about a new Romeo and Juliet, besides “Why?”, is “Why New York City Ballet?”
- Love and death
“Classic Balanchine” as opposed to . . . “Jazz Balanchine”? “Porno Balanchine”? What was the alternative?
- Dreaming and remembrance
Two momentous revivals in town showed us how big the category of classical ballet really is.
- Links to a legacy
In her Pillow Talk at Jacob’s Pillow last weekend, Suzanne Farrell was asked what she expects of the young dancers who are reviving George Balanchine’s ballets under her direction.
- Oppositions
The end of a three-week, thousands-of-miles-from-home season is never the right time to assess a dance company.
- State of the art
Maybe it’s the economy, but Boston Ballet’s third-annual season-opening gala was a sober evening, without the orchestral overture that graced the first two affairs.
- Smaller is better
Next fall, Boston Ballet will move all its performing operations to the Opera House from Citi Performing Arts Center's immense and unfriendly Wang Theatre.
- Not so great
Way back in 1977, PBS gave us a Nutcracker with a difference: Mikhail Baryshnikov as an electrifying Nutcracker/Cavalier and willowy Gelsey Kirkland as an older-than-usual Clara, as the Sugar Plum Fairy.
- Adam and Eve
A day at New York City Ballet that starts with a matinee of Coppélia and ends with a Balanchine evening might seem to offer merely the contrast between classic and modern, old and new.
- Less
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Dance
, Media, New England Conservatory of Music, Giorgio de Chirico, More
, Media, New England Conservatory of Music, Giorgio de Chirico, Anton Belov, Mariinsky Ballet Company, Alexandre Benois, Alexandra Danilova, Leon Bakst, Leonide Massine, Serge Lifar, Less
