How Do You Solve a Problem Like ‘Bayadère’? Send In the Cowboys.

A new production of the ballet sets it in 1930s Hollywood instead of a mythic India, eliminating Orientalist clichés while embracing American ones.

One after the other, women in white step out of the wings, reaching forward into space before swaying gently back, arms overhead. Then they take two steps forward and begin the sequence all over again. This rocking motion, forward and back, repeats for several minutes, until the stage is filled with bodies hovering on pointe, as if sustained by a single breath.

The scene is from Marius Petipa’s “La Bayadère,” a ballet that premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1877. “The spectators must have felt that they had died and gone to heaven, which was more or less the case,” the dance critic Joan Acocella wrote in 2019 of the entrance of the Shades, or female spirits, in the second act.

That sequence — inspired by Gustave Doré’s illustration of souls descending from heaven in an edition of Dante’s “Divina Commedia” — is one of the reasons this ballet, set to a mostly unremarkable score by Ludwig Minkus, has survived when so many others have not.

“It’s a simple thing,” the director and choreographer Phil Chan said, “a throwaway step, even.” But the way the scene is structured, he added, “shows you how you can take a single step and give it to an entire group and make it look exciting and interesting.”

Like many operas and ballets from the 19th century, “La Bayadère,” set in an exoticized, ahistoric and sometimes cartoonish India, doesn’t translate well to our times. Some have questioned whether it should be performed at all. And while it continues to be staged around the world, there has been a noticeable reduction in performances, at least in the United States. In 2022, Susan Jaffe, the new artistic director of American Ballet Theater, said in an interview that it was one of the ballets she planned to shelve temporarily, while thinking about how to make changes.