The Kirov Ballet may be nearly 300 years old, but it is ready to shake things up. The Russian company returns to New York April 1 after a six-year absence, and, for the first time since the Kirov made its American debut in 1961, the company is opening not at the Metropolitan Opera House, but instead at City Center. And for its return, the Kirov is offering not full-length ballets, but “highlights” programs, consisting of one-act ballets and acts excerpted from evening-length works.

The Kirov has been refashioning its identity since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Some of the transformation has involved restoring the distant and elusive past, the pre-revolutionary ballet in which spectacle and pantomime were as important as classical steps. Since ballet was championed by France’s King Louis XIV during the 17th century, it was inevitable that St. Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great in 1703 on the template of European capitals, would import and embrace the Bourbon nobility’s art form. In the 1730s a ballet school was established for children of St. Petersburg court servants, and ballet remained one of the Russian aristocracy’s pet interests right up through the 1917 revolution. The art form’s existence in Russia was briefly in danger in the aftermath of the aristocracy’s demise. But ballet’s value as entertainment, as well as a vehicle of nationalistic pride, was soon recognized. During World War II, most of the Kirov was relocated to the distant city of Perm, and thus spared the catastrophes that befell St. Petersburg during its three-year blockade by the Nazis. (Needless to say, however, the Kirov’s existence in Perm was hardly luxurious.)

In New York the Kirov will perform excerpts from the Imperial ballets, using the somewhat streamlined and modernized versions created during the Soviet era as performance text instead. There will also be the works of Mikhail Fokine, who grew up amid the Petipa tradition, and rebelled against it before leaving for the West in 1917. Just as influential in the development of 20th-century ballet were the neoclassical ballets of George Balanchine, which descended from, as well as contradicted, the tenets of both Petipa and Fokine. Balanchine was born in St. Petersburg, trained at the Mariinsky school, and danced with the company before he too left for the West in 1924. While performances of Balanchine’s “Symphony in C” had been given under the radar at the St. Petersburg Philharmonic in the late 1960s, starring legendary Kirov performers, his ballets could not enter the Kirov’s repertory until 1989, when work created in the West was no longer proscribed. The Kirov’s upcoming season features four performances of an all-Balanchine program. In addition, there are three performances of the works of William Forsythe, dating from the 1980s and ’90s, but tracing some of their lineage back to the spiky edges of Balanchine’s more extreme vocabulary.

Principal roles for the Kirov’s City Center visit are dominated by a relatively restricted cadre of privileged performers, with many of the Kirov’s most interesting dancers excluded or relegated to the periphery. The Kirov’s two prima ballerinas — Uliana Lopatkina and Diana Vishneva — will, however, be on ample display. Indeed, Ms. Lopatkina and Ms. Vishneva are the only senior Kirov ballerinas coming to New York. They’re certainly not all that senior — Ms. Lopatkina joined in 1991 and Ms. Vishneva four years later, both of them immediately after graduating from the Kirov’s feeder school, the Vaganova Ballet Academy.

Each is at an enviable period in a ballerina’s career, when authority and experience are coupled with prime physical capacity. Ms. Lopatkina has made an impressive recovery from a foot injury that kept her offstage for a couple of years during the early part of this decade; indeed, this season will be her first appearance in New York since the Kirov’s 1999 season at the Met. Ms. Lopatkina is cooler, Ms. Vishneva more emotive. Each ballerina has triumphed in all of the different wings of the Kirov repertory; and there is a healthy rivalry between them. Every performance by the two ballerinas is sure to be an occasion.

The young women sharing ballerina roles with Ms. Lopatkina and Ms. Vishneva have demonstrated talent and potential. They have been overburdened with too many demanding roles and too heavy a workload, but I look forward to seeing how they have matured. The men whom the company has selected for exposure at City Center reflect a somewhat wider spectrum of age and experience than the women. There is certainly no shortfall of talent, energy, and ambition here.

The Kirov’s female corps de ballet remains an ideal of length, breadth, and unanimity. This will be a taxing season for these women, who will be onstage in force from the rise of the curtain on opening night until it falls on the final matinee, April 20.

When the Kirov performed in Washington at the Kennedy Center last January, the corps de ballet was impressive but visibly exhausted by the end of a week of “La Bayadère.” One hopes the company is bringing sufficient reinforcements to New York. These women deserve every possible consideration; they are the bedrock of the company.