Main Stage

BALLET No 2

one-act ballet

CREDITS

Music by Alexander Tsfasman
Choreography by Maxim Petrov
Set Designer: Sergei Grachev
Costume Designer: Tatiana Noginova
Lighting Designer: Igor Vints

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

For this work I chose a name by chance, music that is good for dancing and a simple theme – nostalgia for the beautiful past. Twelve dancers perform the choreography in the style of the great performers of the 20th century.
Maxim Petrov

Premiere: 21 March 2015, Mariinsky Theatre
(as a part of the project A Creative Workshop of Young Choreographers)

Running time: 15 minutes

Maxim Petrov, who called his second opus simply Ballet No 2, made a brilliant play on dance nostalgia. His ballet to music by Alexander Tsfasman will undoubtedly prove sweet for the generation of the 1960s and all who love the naïve Soviet positivist films about Shurik. The enchanting young ladies with their hair in "buns" and in short skirts and the young men from a school for working youths have wittily embodied in dance the themes of the best Soviet songs about ten girls for whom, statistically, there are nine boys, about the good girl Lida and about how we are chosen and how we choose. How easy it was to make the auditorium a happy and tranquil place!
Kommersant

Age category 6+


PAVLOVSK

one-act ballet

CREDITS

Music by Karen LeFrak
Choreographer and Set Designer: Maxim Petrov
Costume Designer: Tatiana Noginova
Lighting Designer: Konstantin Binkin

Premiere: 7 April 2016, Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg
(as a part of the project A Creative Workshop of Young Choreographers)

Running time 10 minutes

Age category: 0+


LE DIVERTISSEMENT DU ROI

one-act ballet

CREDITS

Music by Jean-Philippe Rameau
Choreography by Maxim Petrov
Costume Designer: Tatiana Noginova
Lighting Designer: Konstantin Binkin
Libretto by Bogdan Korolyok

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

Le Divertissement du Roi is a neoclassical fantasy on a baroque theme, it is recollections of the happy beginnings of the art of ballet that unfolded in the Louvre and in Versailles. The protagonist of the ballet is a King who loves to appear at the theatre dressed as the Sun. The prototypes number more than just Louis XIV: contrary to popular opinion, the epithet Le Roi Soleil was first attributed to his most august father, Louis XIII. Just as much as his son, he loved to take part in Court masquerade balls, and not always as the star of day. Much more frequently he appeared as marginalised urban dwellers and port idlers - such as a drunken Dutch captain. Maxim Petrov’s ballet is a catalogue of cherished images of baroque ballet. Although the music used is by Jean-Philippe Rameau – and this is a very late score from the baroque theatre tradition – the divertissement features entrées typical of earlier times. There are peasants on the stage (the indispensable gallants), Play and Pleasure as well as miraculous snails which are also ugly furies. But the protagonist of the evening is Armide the magician. The mistress of enchanted salons that appear and disappear as she waves her hand is, arguably, a key feature of baroque art, tensely feeling the border between dreams and reality, trying to separate illusions from truth. In brief, no-one can ultimately guarantee that the entire so-called “king’s divertissement” is not an illusion – a jester’s trick with fairground comedians.
Bogdan Korolyok

Premiere: 14 June 2015, Mariinsky Theatre, St Peterburg

Running time 30 minutes

Age category: 6+