When the Bolshoi Ballet made its American debut in the spring of 1959, the star of the show was prima ballerina Galina Ulanova. Critical darling that she was, the Soviet Artist of the People was nonetheless bested in the society pages by a heavyset bald man in George Smiley glasses and a fedora. Because in 1959, squiring the Bolshoi Ballet across America was a role you took pride in, and Sol Hurok, the Bolshoi’s first and finest squire, took pride publicly.
“I spread the great gospel of culture,” was a typical Hurok quote, along with, “At the Metropolitan Opera House, even with the Bolshoi, I lose $175,000. Believe me.” The great gospel, he insisted, came at a high price.
So much has changed since Hurok single-handedly bought, sold, promoted and hosted the Bolshoi in America it’s hard to know where to look for context: The political landscape, the business of ballet, the role of cultural exchange — all these are radically different in the thoroughly globalized and commercialized 21st century landscape.
But one thing remains the same: the Bolshoi is still a colossal undertaking for foreign promoters. As the largest ballet company in the world, its productions are famously costly to transport and stage. Add to that the PR challenges presented by the theater’s recent scandal-bender and the present political frost between Moscow and Washington, and it’s no wonder no one is crowing about “getting the Bolshoi.” The team of presenters, managers, agents and donors behind the ballet’s first New York appearance in a decade are sedate; their expectations, realistic.
“We’re basically all hoping to break even,” says one person close to the operations of the upcoming engagement at Lincoln Center Festival.
Which would have Hurok rolling over in his grave. Because what they should be telling us is just how much money they are willing to lose to bring us the incomparable, historic, Bolshoi Ballet. “That’s the difference between an impresario and a manager,” Hurok would, no doubt, harrumph.
Harold Clarkson, director of international touring at IMG Artists, quite likes the title “impresario,” though it’s not one he uses himself. An Englishman who bears a slight physical resemblance to his legendary Soviet-era predecessor, Clarkson reveals none of Hurok’s self-aggrandizement as the man who meets the Bolshoi on arrival in America. Managers of international tours, he demurs, “cannot be god-like” and should maintain a place “behind the scenes, since no one really cares how many containers of costumes we are moving from JFK to Lincoln Center.”
He’s right, of course. But it’s hard not to imagine Hurok’s retort. A Ukrainian immigrant who shed neither his Old World accent nor his striving tenacity in his rise through the social and cultural echelons of America’s elite, Hurok was fond of god-like gestures of magnanimity (extravagant rooftop parties on the St. Regis hotel on closing night were a S. Hurok signature) and public proclamations of his impossible feats. As he told the New York Times in 1966:
“No profit. Believe me. Sixty-five stage hands, ninety-one in the orchestra. Transportation. And baggage. My God, such baggage. And I have to advertise, to make the propaganda. And the rent. My God the rent.”
At the time of Hurok’s lament, the rent at the Metropolitan was $60,000 per week, the highest lease in as many as three dozen cities to be paid out during a two-month tour. Today the rent for a New York city appearance is in the neighborhood of $150,000 per week, and the company will perform in just one other venue in Saratoga Springs before flying home. But Clarkson and his team do not figure rent into their budget, nor are they responsible for marketing and advertisement. All of that comes out of the pocket of Lincoln Center Festival and the Festival’s sponsors. (In the case of the July Bolshoi appearance, the principal endowment comes from the New York-based Blavatnik Family Foundation for Dance.)
Still, Clarkson assures me, IMG is “taking an enormous risk.” The company pays the full tab for the Bolshoi’s transportation, accommodation and cargo (300 artists and employees and sixteen shipping containers, for the record). The thin margin of profit is calculated from the flat fee negotiated with the presenter, the Lincoln Center Festival, from which point currency fluctuations and last-minute hiccups take their cut. In the end, says Clarkson, “It’s not a business you make much money in.”
In London, Victor Hochhauser agrees with this assessment. A living legend in the business, Hochhauser and his wife Lilian count among their historic introductions to the West the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and violinist David Oistrakh. It was the Hochhausers who arranged the first-ever Bolshoi Ballet tour outside of Russia, three years before Hurok brought the company to America. Uniquely in the modern arena, the Hochhausers continue to operate independently — maintaining sole control over contracts, repertoire, billing and even ticket sales, all without a single major donor or underwriter. But, Hochhauser tells me over the phone, “it is not an occupation I can recommend anymore.”
The Hochhausers, who still handle all of the Bolshoi’s engagements in London, were instrumental in introducing Clarkson and IMG to the Bolshoi’s then-director, Anatoly Iksanov, to help craft the company’s 21st century touring strategy. Lilian calls Clarkson “an excellent manager and a lovely man.” But his is a different talent, implies Victor, from that of true impresario.
“Today you don’t get the kind of visionaries like Sol Hurok,” he tells me. “And the artists no longer rely on personal promotion.”
It strikes me as an interesting concern, given that individual artists, particularly ballerinas of the Bolshoi Ballet, are quite openly promoted by private sponsors. It is a relationship with a long and sometimes sordid history — the role of ballerina and patron; At the Bolshoi it has surfaced repeatedly in allegations of blackmail, bribery, and corruption, culminating in a violent attack on the company’s artistic director, Sergei Filin, allegedly organized by one of his own dancers, who is now doing time in a penal camp.
But like the rent at the Met Opera, the Bolshoi’s recovery from its annus horibilis is not Clarkson’s problem. (Nor, judging from the sold-out box office for their July performances, is it a problem at all.) But Hochhauser touches on something important when he laments the lack of personal promotion from outside the theater. In London, where the abundance of Russian billionaires means he could have his pick of underwriters, Hochhauser is dismissive, saying “a very minute part of the wealth of these oligarchs is going to the arts.”
One could argue there is a similar stinginess in New York, where the Bolshoi program will credit the Blavatnik Family Foundation as the official U.S. sponsor. I say that without any knowledge of the sum of the Blavatnik donation, which may be very generous indeed. I say it purely out of a compulsive comparison: because Len Blavatnik, a self-made billionaire who hails from the same part of the world as Sol Hurok and knows what it means to lose one’s shirt on an investment, refuses to comment on his sponsorship of the Bolshoi in America.
Sol Hurok was a Ukrainian-American Jew who weathered bankruptcy, defecting ballerinas and byzantine negotiations with the Soviet State Apparatus for Concerts and Touring to bring the Bolshoi to American stages from Detroit to Orlando during the Cold War. Len Blavatnik is a Ukrainian-American oligarch who is sponsoring the Bolshoi’s upcoming July engagement, but won’t talk about it.
Could it be that the current tensions between the United States and Russia over the current conflict in Ukraine play a role in the Bolshoi’s 2014 tour?
It is a historical fact that Hurok would have never achieved his three-decade long quest to present the Bolshoi if not for the political thaw that followed Joseph Stalin’s death. Relations between Washington and Moscow dictated the ease of U.S.-Soviet exchanges that followed, enabled by the 1958 Cultural Exchange Act. Indeed, at the time of Hurok’s death in 1979, an impasse between the two countries over the Soviet Union’s treatment of Jews and dissidents had derailed his final dream — to bring a double-billed Bolshoi Ballet and Opera program to American audiences. (A rare event that Clarkson’s negotiations have secured for Lincoln Center Festival.)
But as I wrote in the Huffington Post in May, pundits may proclaim relations between Washington and Moscow at a historic low, but they have, in fact, been lower. And when they were, Americans were having a love fest with Russian ballet: In the fall of 1962, as the nation was gripped by the terror of nuclear annihilation over a battery of missiles in Cuba, the Bolshoi Ballet was in the midst of a 15-city American tour. Yet when the company arrived in Washington two weeks after the most existential of Cold War crises the White House opened its doors to the whole troupe of 130 dancers; President Kennedy attended the premiere (or at least two of Swan Lake’s four long acts); and Jackie and Caroline raptly observed rehearsals.
The present dispute over Russian aggression in the Ukraine is no Cuban Missile Crisis; if it were, the philanthropy of the Blavatnik Foundation could conceivably fall under the scrutiny of sanctioners. Len Blavatnik may have lost $1.8 billion in the financial hit of Ukraine’s chaos, as reported by Reuters, but he is unlikely to lose any social standing by underwriting the Bolshoi Ballet on tour.
Still, the fact that the present friction between Moscow and Washington is not a significant barrier for Clarkson and his Russian counterparts points to a different dynamic in the Bolshoi’s engagement. Far from being cultural ambassadors, bearing messages of peace along with their ideological superiority, Russian artists today are free agents. Allegiances in the current Russian world of ballet hang on rival theaters, not rival superpowers. The Bolshoi’s true foes, it would seem, are St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky and Mikhailovsky Theaters, whose talent for poaching Bolshoi stars has given new meaning to the term “defecting dancer.”
Sol Hurok walked a fine line of diplomacy as the Bolshoi’s ambassador to America. Having survived the tensions between Kennedy and Khrushchev over missiles in Cuba, Hurok later found himself in a backstage squabble with the president’s brother who counted himself among the many admirers of the Bolshoi prima ballerina, Maya Plisetskaya. Fearing the repercussions for Plisetskaya from her KGB minders, Hurok tried to dissuade the Attorney General Robert Kennedy from inviting her to dinner. According to Hurok’s biographer, Harlow Robinson, the impresario was duly admonished:
“They are not in Russia. They are in America. Maybe you’ve forgotten, Mr. Hurok, that they can do whatever they want.”
And so Plisetskaya and RFK went dancing, with Sol Hurok as a chaperone.
Svetlana Zakharova is the Bolshoi’s reigning star, as well as a former member of the Russian legislature with close ties to President Vladimir Putin. She was also born in Ukraine. But don’t expect her to give lip service to any party line when she dances Odette/Odile in July. Nor is it likely that she will be written up in Page Six for clubbing with an American politico. Not because it couldn’t happen, but because no one would much care.
“The Bolshoi coming is not about cultural diplomacy, it’s about finance,” says Naima Prevots, a dance historian who has written about the political impact of the Cold War era tours that Hurok championed. In fact, she would argue, money was always a driving force of the Soviet Ministry of Culture’s willingness to let the Bolshoi travel to the West. “They needed the hard currency,” she notes.
This was certainly true during the calamitous decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the greatest stars of the ballet were reduced to private lessons for foreigners just to make ends meet.
In the 1990s, American audiences had an abundance of opportunities to see Bolshoi ballerinas, packaged and promoted by small-time impresarios without Hurok’s stature or connections, who had no qualms about packaging their imported talent alongside Las Vegas showgirls. Critics and fans agreed that the hard times on which the famous company had fallen, showed. “There was too much touring,” says Clarkson delicately.
But the 21st century Bolshoi is flush. The Putin administration, which delivers largesse and maintains social quiescence largely with petrodollars, has enriched the ballet immensely, effectively doubling the annual budget and encouraging enormous private contributions through a Bolshoi Foundation stacked with oligarchs.
“They don’t need money from touring. They make money at home,” says Clarkson. The motivation for touring today, he says, is to burnish the Bolshoi Theater’s global standing. “It is hugely important for the ballet to be seen in New York.” And yet, when the Bolshoi takes the stage at Lincoln Center on July 12, it will be the first time since 2005.
“Really? Nearly ten years?” marvels Boris Akimov when I point this out.
Akimov, who has been with the Bolshoi since Hurok’s time — as a soloist, coach, and, briefly, artistic director — looks back on his first American tour with the nostalgia of a performer who equates his own twilight with that of his art. The Bolshoi is no longer a draw in America, he asserts, because of the internet and DVD’s. Gone, he laments, is the “exotic” of the famed ballet. Gone too, he notes, are talented choreographers, universally acclaimed stars, and promoters who care more for the art than for making money.
There is something to the romantic regret in the rear-view mirror of both Hochhauser and Akimov. When the Bolshoi Ballet first came to America, simple curiosity was a large component in the lines that formed days in advance. So hungry was Main Street for a taste of the legendary Russian ballerinas, Hurok had to scramble to find dates in a month long tour for third-tier cities. And the Bolshoi cooperated. The dancers whose home theater was among the largest in the world and boasted gold-plated Tsar’s boxes and, as one ideological reviewer put it, “sumptuous scenery that only communists could afford,” happily agreed to dance in movie theaters, provincial grange halls with leaky roofs and, on at least one occasion, to audiences accommodated on folding chairs in the aisles.
But it was precisely the suitability of a venue that proved to be a deal-breaker for the Bolshoi in New York over the past decade, according to Clarkson. Having performed only at Lincoln Center’s Metropolitan Opera, the company was reluctant to settle for the compound’s smaller Koch Theater, despite the fact that it is the New York theater designed precisely for dance performances, and to the specifications of New York City Ballet’s Georges Balanchine himself.
“It was the lack of availability, not will,” says Clarkson of the venue stalemate. But the importance, both for the Bolshoi and for Lincoln Center, of a public reunion has at last triumphed and the Russians will dance in the house that George built. Says Clarkson: “I am totally thrilled that it is finally happening.”
Of course he is. The Bolshoi Ballet, for all its complexity, cost and drama, is still the jewel in any impresario’s crown. Amidst the most sordid of scandals, the Bolshoi remains glamourous. Against the most staid of backdrops (“Swan Lake” again? Another “Giselle”?), the Bolshoi reigns supreme. Managerial instability and mercurial artistic leadership notwithstanding, the Bolshoi balances confidently at the pinnacle of high culture.
So when Clarkson tells me that the Bolshoi is the only of his clients that he accompanies everywhere, I believe him. But I know that he will not don a top hat and cane and throw a grand party on the roof of the St. Regis hotel to demonstrate his delight.
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