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234th Season

Mariinsky II (New Theatre)

17 February
19:30
2019 | Sunday
Evening of one-act ballets: "Symphony in Three Movements" "Clay" "Le Divertissement du roi"
Ballet
Artists Credits
Ballet company
Cast to be announced


"Symphony in Three Movements"

Credits

Music by Igor Stravinsky
Choreography by Radu Poklitaru
Set and Costume Designer: Anna Matison
Lighting Designer: Alexander Sivaev
Video Graphics Designer: Alexander Kravchenko
Assistant Choreographer: Sergei Kon

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

Using a symphony in ballet is a 20th-century innovation. The impulse for the worldwide dissemination of the genre of the dance symphony came with production by Fyodor Lopukhov in Petrograd in 1923 with a ballet set to the music of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony. George Balanchine, who took part in that avant-garde production, took up the idea of the plastique interpretation of the complex musical format, developing his artistic credo as a choreographer thus: “You see the music and you hear the dance.” Inspired by the nature of pure dance he rejected any plot and superfluous psychology, behind his movements, there were no human passions, there was just the music, its rhythm and structure defining the development of the choreographic image. Following the same lines, in 1972 Balanchine created his first dance version of the score of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. And yet there was another path in the emergence of symphonic dance. In the 1930s the choreographer Léonide Massine brought to life a whole series of symphonic ballets in which, avoiding fairy-tale narrative in a sequence of allegories and metaphors he narrated dance stories. The path chosen by Radu Poklitaru for his production of Symphony in Three Movements at the Mariinsky Theatre is close to Massine’s. In his production, one can see a plot with a beginning, peripeteia and dénouement. The images conceived by the choreographer blend together with Stravinsky’s idea: the composer admitted that the third movement of his Symphony was a response to documental chronologies of the war years with lines of marching soldiers, and later with Poklitaru, it would seem, the troops come on-stage in the finale, without succumbing to the aggression of the first two movements...
Olga Makarova

 

Premiere: 30 December 2015, Mariinsky Theatre

Age category 12+

 

"Clay"

Credits

Music by Darius Milhaud
Choreography by Vladimir Varnava
Costume Designer: Irina Varnava
Lighting Designer: Igor Vints

 

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

Running time: 20 minutes

 

It is an amazing play of “biomasses”, from which the creator forms destinies, characters, events and stories. Mr Varnava does not amend the dance movements to fit the plot, but, like the ancient Parcae, draws the plastique thread from it, twisting and winding a tightly-knit story that is engaging visually and emotionally.
Kommersant

 

Age category 6+

 

"Le Divertissement du Roi"

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 the 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 the 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+

 


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