Ballet’s renowned pointe man

By Joe Brown

Friday, May 16, 2008 | 2 a.m.

The young dancers rehearsing for this weekend’s performances of “Cinderella” don’t seem to realize they are in the presence of a world-famous prima ballerina.

You can’t really blame them: The legendary dancer, watching the rehearsal with arms crossed, is deeply incognito — shlumpy, even — in a beige pullover and plaid shorts, black Crocs with slouchy beige socks.

The ballerina in question is Peter Anastos.

Yes, a man can be a ballerina.

“A ballerina,” Anastos says, “is not really a woman. She’s a symbol, she’s a vessel for an idea: a tragedy, a story, a comedy, a dance. The sex is not real in classical ballets.”

Long retired from performing, Anastos is a classical choreographer who is perhaps best-known as the founder of the internationally renowned drag troupe known as Les Ballets Trockaderos de Monte Carlo. Through the ’70s, Anastos was the troupe’s prima, performing under the name Olga Tchikaboomskaya (his fellow “Trocks” danced under such names as Ludmila Beaulemova and Olga Supphozova).

With four days remaining before the first performance, Anastos has flown from his Pennsylvania home to Las Vegas to “detail” the Nevada Ballet Theatre’s new production of his “Cinderella,” which is set to a score by Sergei Prokofiev.

It’s already a hit: All six performances at UNLV’s 500-seat Judy Bayley Theatre have been sold out for some time. Even the choreographer can’t score an extra ticket.

Walking from the rehearsal floor to a quieter studio nearby, Anastos passes NBT’s wardrobe room, where piles of tutus are stacked like wafer-thin pancakes. A wardrobe mistress is painting delicate gold decorations on a pink satin skirt that stretches 15 feet from end to end.

“This is a new production — new scenery, new costumes, new everything — so we have a million bugs to work out,” Anastos says with the calm of someone who has been doing this for decades. The NBT engaged famed designer Christina Giannini to work with Anastos on a new concept for the ballet, and they came up with an adaptation set in the period of Jane Austen.

“It’s early 19th century, which is so much more free, body movement-wise. It was a real revolution in clothes. It’s a great period to make fun with and it’s also beautiful in an English painterly, Gainsborough kind of way.

This new “Cinderella” emerged from the ashes of Anastos’ 1983 collaboration with Mikhail Baryshnikov for American Ballet Theatre.

“Audiences liked it,” Anastos says of that “Cinderella.” “And it made a lot of money, did all the things it was meant to do for the company. But it got roasted by the critics, and after the second season it was never brought back again.”

Soon after, Baryshnikov left the company “in a very nasty breakup,” and wouldn’t allow the ABT to do any of his ballets anymore, including “Cinderella,” which tied up the production for years so it couldn’t be done.

Anastos chuckles as he admits that having dual — sometimes dueling — choreographers working on a ballet was their first mistake.

“It’s like having two presidents,” he says. “You can’t have two choreographers in a room, you just can’t.”

So this million-dollar “Cinderella” disappeared. “It’s sitting in a warehouse somewhere getting moth-eaten,” Anastos says. Years later, he was encouraged by a colleague to revisit the score and reclaim some of his own good ideas.

The NBT dancers may not know the choreographer’s back story, but they are clearly thrilled to be working with Anastos, who brings a lifetime of deep academic, historical and physical knowledge of ballet.

“Dancers seem to like that a lot,” he says. “They like working with the person whose idea the ballet was, they like to be growing from the original concept.”

The feeling is mutual: Anastos calls Nevada Ballet Theatre “a very, very strong company, very smart, very fast. This company would be at home at any big city in the East or Europe. Any world-class choreographer can come in here and be at home in that room.”

A pianist before he was a choreographer, Anastos reads scores and has seamlessly integrated waltzes from other Prokofiev pieces, including “War and Peace,” into his new “Cinderella.” He promises many more hidden treasures for the alert observer.

Anastos admits he hasn’t shared many of these musical in-jokes and academic insights with the NBT dancers.

“Sometimes dancers like to hear this stuff and sometimes they don’t,” Anastos says, laughing. “Dance is intuitive, so a little knowledge might not be that helpful for some people.”

One of Anastos’ specialties — a byproduct of his Trockaderos experience — is finding and freeing the innate humor in classical ballet. Not coincidentally, “Cinderella” includes two drag roles, for the cruel stepsisters, of course.

“We have one really mean one, one really shy, kind of messed-up one,” Anastos says, adding that the sisters have the best parts in the ballet. “There’s something really creepy about two women ganging up on another girl. It just looks bad. But if these two hulking drag queens are picking on this little tiny Cinderella, that’s funny.” When he left the Trockadero in 1980, he handed over all his original choreography and didn’t look back. More than 30 years later, the third generation of the troupe is still dancing his ballets. Anastos still makes ballets for an offshoot of the Trocks called the Ballet Grand Diva, which rarely tours the United States.

And after freelancing as a choreographer all over the world for 12 years, Anastos is about to become the artistic director of a new company (his third) in Boise, Idaho. He’s headed for Boise right after finishing work on “Cinderella.”

Anastos says he’s excited about bringing more people to “really good classical ballet,” without resorting to high-tech gimmicks.

“Ballet, in a way, is almost unaffected by all the technological and media changes that have affected almost every other art form,” he says. “People still come to the ballet because it’s a standard thing. It hasn’t changed. You’re going to the theater, sitting in the dark in a community of others, the curtain goes up and this great mystery, this ritual, is revealed to you somehow. It’s primitive, it’s prehistoric. These ballets, these wordless moving art images, are classic.”

And that includes “Cinderella.”

“It’s a fairy tale,” he says. “You don’t mess with a fairy tale, you just tell it.”