At the first night of Alexei Ratmansky’s ballet Ìaria Allash appeared as the title role performer of the third cast. The ballet created by him three years earlier for Nina Ananiashvily has been reworked and what is being performed on the New stage of the Bolshoi theatre is a new version of the ballet. The first cast premiere was danced by Nadezhda Gracheva, professionally strong, but regretfully monotonous. The ballerina remained alien both to Ratmansky’s unusual choreographic language and dramatic essence of the role.

At the second night Ìaria Àleksandrova as Leah depicted her heroine with broad strokes and looked a bit too diselegant and abrupt for the modest Jewish girl Leah. Ìaria Allash looked the most impressive of the three performers as she discovered and conveyed a lot of nuances and added some completely new accents.

The role of Leah fitted the ballerina like a second skin: her huge black eyes, expressive swarthy face, tight dark plaits. In the first scenes of the ballet she appeared amazingly young, beaming all over with love, sincerely naive and almost childishly trustful. Allash’s Leah saw the world around her with joyful surprise as if she didn’t notice the oppressive gloominess of the situation. In her Leah there were both tenderness and shyness, and captivating femininity while her filigree movements are full of ingratiating softness. The ballerina precisely traced the change in Leah’s internal condition by showing her suddenly growing torpid and rigid in the scene of her engagement to the rich groom Ìånashe (Zakhar Potapov) to be followed immediately by somewhat dollishly quick and mechanistic gestures. She suddenly started moving like a puppet. By means of her strange dancing, as if an inanimate object, the ballerina displayed Leah’s being at a loss and a complete failure to comprehend what was going on.

This metamorphosis which occurred to her during the wedding, when the spirit of her dead beloved Khanan descended on her, Maria Allash conveyed through a complex range of feelings, sharp changes in her mood, by dancing the whole scene at the limit of her emotions and at the same time with psychological subtlety. Freezing horror, bursts of despair, spells of internal estrangement before faints and fear of returning to reality - each gesture, each turn of her head, each glance of hers - everything was magnificently performed. It seemed that Leah’s arms and legs existed separately, she had no command of her own limbs. She was literally choked with her feelings. With rare expressiveness Maria Allash did an episode which surprisingly remained completely unnoticed by all other performers of this part - with her own hand she slowly strokes her cheek, nestles to it with the same tenderness, as if it belonged to Khanan, but then gets frightened and pushes it away with horror, literally rejects it from herself, again realizing her own powerlessness in front of this, completely unknown to her, power of the spirit that came upon her. And when the specter of Khanan (Sergey Filin) imperceptibly occurs from behind the high back chair, in which Leah is sitting, on seeing him she silently "shouts". Khanan stops her by closing her mouth with the palm, but her widely opened huge black eyes shout, they convey this shouting, shrilling and unstoppable. In Ìaria Allash’s performing there were a lot of memorable nuances - how sharply her shoulders were shuddering and her body was quivering when Dibbuk was being exiled from Leah’s body, and her tardy movements before her death, the condition of the hypnotised heroine.

The part of Leah, undoubtedly, has become one of Ìaria Àllash’s most interesting works, that made us think and approach it differently. The ballerina seems to be the best of the three performers who have danced this part, though she was only a third cast Leah. But truly her dancing attached new colours to the ballet and let it sound a tragedy.