But does it have a pointe?

Teal and I are trying to wrangle our schedules and budgets to allow for another hit of Mariinsky ballet goodness. A couple of summers ago, I ended up with tickets to their production of "Le Corsaire," one of the story ballets I didn't know well. I did know that one of the male dancers traditionally spends the show shirtless, which is how I sold it to Teal, who is not a big dance buff but who will try anything once. It's in the name of the arts, we agreed.

We were lucky enough to see the lineup with young Leonid Sarafanov dancing as Ali. Sarafanov is slimmer than the average male dancer, with long lines like a Balanchine girl, and the contrast between his form and that of the chunkier lead dancer was striking. Also striking was the fact that the stagehands apparently hadn't prepped the stage correctly: The ballerina dancing Medora came gliding out en pointe in a beautiful pas de bourée couru, but just as she reached center stage, she slipped entirely off her toes and fell onto her hip with a thud that the whole theater could hear. The audience gasped, she got back up and finished the scene, to firm applause, and the curtain came down. It stayed down for a long few minutes, too, but nobody in the audience muttered; we were all picturing stagehands being chivvied across the floor, driven by Russian invective, trying to get the surface fixed properly. The rest of the show wasn't marred with anything so bad, but once or twice it was possible to see a dancer's foot skid when it was meant to be planted, and some of the dancers were just visibly conservative. It must've been nerve-wracking for them.

But you couldn't have told that from Sarafanov's performance. Ali is a supporting role, but like Mercutio it gets some of the best solo bits. The Kirov's Ali has a solo in the second act, reassuring the captured princess or something, and Sarafanov came bounding out like a kid on Christmas. He had long clean lines, a sharp point, and beautiful ease in his leaps, not so much defying gravity as treating it as a quaint convention. There came a point where he did a series of three spinning kicking jumps, and when he went into the first his body was so far off the vertical that it looked as though he was bound to fall as hard as Medora had. No; he spun like a cat and landed cleanly, then rose and jumped again, body again angled out in space. The audience gasped; he was doing it on purpose. He landed again, the audience started to applaud, and he did it a third time, still looking cheerful and easy in the air. Ballet crowds are pretty quiet most of the time, like golf fans in foundation garments and industrial hairspray, and so when I say that I heard actual screaming believe me it came as a shock. Sarafanov finished his solo still looking unruffled and happy, which is more than can be said for the lead cavalier, who stalked out glaring at the applause for a secondary character. The Post's reviewer made a snippy remark about the jumps being more fit for martial arts than ballet, but if the Mariinsky is willing to allow it, who am I to judge?

This time it's "La Bayadère," which is another ballet for abs fans (man, these things must seem weird to actual Indian and Turkish dancers: "Is that supposed to be us?"), and he's dancing the lead. I've got my fingers crossed for lots of jumps; it does the Kennedy Center's chandeliers good to get the dust shaken out of them by the whooping and hollering.