The National Ballet of China has arrived for a week's season at Covent Garden, bringing Swan Lake as its opening gambit on Monday night, and following it on Friday with Raise the Red Lantern . This repertory ploy is astute: we are to see not only that the Chinese troupe is a fine classical ensemble in the most sacred of balletic fare, but that the company is also able to make works that reconcile the demands of its national identity and theatrical traditions with the exigencies of the western dance-manner it has embraced.
The company is, as we saw with this Swan Lake , and as I have had the pleasure of reporting over the past decades, a strong, assured ensemble. These dancers have not put on the academic manner as a convenient disguise: the style is theirs by right, and they speak its language with authority.
You have but to watch Wang Qimin, the Odette/Odile on Monday night, to know that you are in the presence of an artist of marvellous gifts, exquisite voice, unerring sensibility, most refined physique. The role lives and flowers in her performance. (Only in St Petersburg, I would venture, are you likely to find another young ballerina so grandly suited to the most extreme demands of the classical style.) The placing of the dance on her body, the articulation of a phrase, the ravishing onward flow of movement and the perfect outlines of a gesture as it lingers on the air, are tribute not just to her own astonishing gifts but to the academic disciplines that have shaped the entire ensemble.
The white flurry of swan-maidens in the second and fourth acts (this last in Frederick Ashton's elegiac version) is a marvel of schooling and disciplined intelligence: the inner world of Swan Lake , with its mysterious aspirations and despairs, and the shaping of this dreamworld in the language of the academy, is admirably done by the company. The production is Natalya Makarova's, with its stylistic intelligence, its ardours and its sense of mystery - drama as hallucination - framed by Peter Farmer's darkly brooding designs.
The Chinese dancers respond throughout with entire devotion. Ensembles are coherent (if tending towards the lightweight in the ballroom's national divertissements, though this is a failing with every troupe save at the Mariinsky) and everywhere you can see the clarity of means, the sense not of best behaviour but of best manners, which touches everything this company performs. This was also evident in the playing of the National Ballet's orchestra under Zhang Yi. Individual roles were done with finesse: Hao Bin was Siegfried, his dancing clean and assured, and the first act trio was elegantly stated by Yu Bo, Cao Shuci and Zhang Siyuan.
Looking at this first appearance in our national ballet house, we have to recall that ballet in China is the fruit of 60 years of aspiration and endeavour (and those years terribly scarred by the decade of the Cultural Revolution). As with so much from China's four millennia of artistic creativity, we marvel and rejoice.