Balletómanos

On the evening of Feb. 6, the Russian ballerina Anzhelina Vorontsova had to take another trip abroad — this time to Italy — for some performances she wished she had been able to decline. Winsome as a porcelain doll and sublime on the stage, the 21-year-old had little desire to take time away from her work at the Bolshoi Ballet, the legendary Moscow company where she has been a soloist since 2009. But her Bolshoi salary is “miserly,” she says, and moonlighting abroad is her only way to make a decent living. “They don’t let me dance here,” she told me that day during a Bolshoi rehearsal, which she was squeezing in before the flight. “You have no idea how long I’ve been asking to dance Swan Lake, and they refuse.”

It is a gripe that comes up endlessly among the troupe, usually aimed at the theater’s artistic director, Sergei…