Everywhere you look in Moscow there are signs of the city’s brash and
relentless drive to modernise. Landmark Soviet buildings have been torn
down, glitzy shopping malls have sprung up, Western designer goods compete
to lure the newly rich, while parts of central Moscow feel more like Fifth
Avenue than the land of Stalin and Khrushchev.
Even the Bolshoi Ballet, once the ultimate symbol of Soviet state culture, is
basking in change. Its magnificent old theatre is closed for a £250 million
refurbishment, while dancers perform in a swanky new theatre next door.
Artistically, too, it’s on the move. For the past three years Alexei
Ratmansky, a mild-mannered Russian with extensive experience in the West,
has been shaking up old attitudes in the world’s biggest ballet company.
When Moscow’s top troupe comes to London later this month the fruits of
rejuvenation will be on show. You will see ballerinas jettison their pointe
shoes in favour of trainers to dance Twyla Tharp’s athletic In the
Upper Room, or wind themselves around Christopher Wheeldon’s more suggestive
talents in Elsinore, his new Hamlet-inspired ballet. Or excel themselves
in the boisterous high-jinks of Ratmansky’s superb Shostakovich comedy The
Bright Stream.
Yet the season’s starring attraction will proudly turn the clock back more
than 100 years to showcase a modern company in tune with the past. For
Ratmansky’s latest project has been to recreate, as faithfully as possible,
Marius Petipa’s 1899 Le Corsaire, a rollicking pirate comedy loosely
based on Byron’s 1814 epic poem. With its dynamic panoply of dashing
pirates, randy pachas, pretty slave girls and distressed damsels, Petipa’s
extravaganza will provide a suitably spectacular opening to the Bolshoi’s
Coliseum season on July 30.
Le Corsaire is deliriously old-fashioned. It brims with the kind of leisurely
display dances and colourful characterisations that ballets used to have
time for in the days of the Tsar. Which means it’s almost the last thing you
would expect the Bolshoi to be doing at this point in its history. Yet
Ratmansky, who calls Petipa “our Shakespeare, our Pushkin, our everything”,
has no doubts about revisiting him.
“We have a crisis of ideas in classical ballet right now,” he says, echoing
the sentiments of just about every ballet director in the world. “But we
can’t just take from the West. We need to find new ideas within ourselves,
within our own Russian traditions, within our own blood. We can create a
real future by looking carefully at every period of our past.”
Ratmansky is a man who knows what he’s talking about. Despite a career as a
dancer that brought him into contact with a wide range of modern influences,
his own credentials as a choreographer are underpinned by his
acknowledgement of past masters. His Bright Stream was such a success in
part because it owed a debt to the exuberant comic sensibilities of Léonide
Massine, a former Bolshoi dancer whose glittering choreographic career was
born when he went West in 1914.
Taking on Le Corsaire, though, isn’t as easy as it sounds. The ballet has a
long and variable history. The first major staging took place at the Paris
Opera in 1856, with a score by Adolphe Adam and choreography by Joseph
Mazilier. It landed in Russia two years later, where Petipa got his hands on
it. For the next 150 years it was subjected to numerous changes in both St
Petersburg and Moscow, not least by Petipa himself.
This Corsaire is based on Petipa’s 1899 version for the Maryinsky in St
Petersburg – the last of his five stagings – a production notated in scores
now held by the Harvard University Theatre Collection in America. The
Bolshoi is using Adam’s score in its original orchestration, although
augmented by the other composers (Léo Delibes, Cesare Pugni and Riccardo
Drigo among them) who subsequently wrote additional music for Petipa.
With pirates currently all the rage – the Bolshoi programme couldn’t resist
devoting a full page to a picture of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow –
many directors would have been tempted to bring a contemporary spin to Le
Corsaire. But not Ratmansky.
“I wouldn’t go for any other way of doing the classics,” he says. “I love and
adore the Imperial Russian ballet, so why change it? These people who
created the classics, they weren’t fools. They had a great sense of theatre
and logic. Petipa was a master without peer when it comes to the art of
composition, an art now in decline. He is not someone we should change.”
So Ratmansky and his collaborator, Yuri Burlaka, the ballet master charged
with deciphering the notated scores, didn’t. What they did was to fill in
the missing bits with Ratmansky’s own choreography, seamlessly woven into
Petipa’s grand plan. “About half of the choreography is Petipa and about 20
minutes of the mime is his too,” Ratmansky says. “But it’s not a
reconstruction. That wasn’t possible. We cut a lot of very detailed and slow
mime. If we had kept it all in the production would have been four or five
hours long.” As its Moscow premiere, the ballet ran for three and a half
hours. For London, we’re told, the production will be trimmed to more
audience-friendly proportions.
The sets, too, are not an exact reproduction of 1899 but rather in the style
of a lookalike. Ten metres high, they make extensive use of painted cloth to
evoke Turkish bazaar, pirates’ cave and Pacha’s palace in the most colourful
terms. The costumes, based on Yevgeny Ponomaryov’s sketches in the St
Petersburg State Theatre Library, offer a dazzling fashion parade of
flowered tutus and harem trousers.
The cast is huge – 120 in total – while the choreography embraces everything
from caricature to grand classicism, the latter wonderfully showcased in Le
Jardin Animé, an extravagant celebration of female pulchritude set in a
Turkish harem. As for the famous pas de deux for Medora and Conrad, which is
frequently performed on its own, “that may not be Petipa, but possibly it’s
a reworking of Petipa; we just don’t know. We kept it in because you can’t
have Corsaire without that pas de deux, and it’s pretty much the only
thing Conrad gets to dance.”
Up until now, it’s been St Petersburg’s great company, the Maryinsky-Kirov,
which has led the fashion for authentic Petipa stagings, first with its
extraordinary recreation of The Sleeping Beauty and then with La Bayadère,
both of which were seen in London. Yet the Bolshoi’s need to rescue its
19th-century repertoire is far more pressing than the Kirov’s. Thanks to
Yuri Grigorovich’s 30-year dictatorship (which ended in 1995), some of the
key classics in the Bolshoi repertoire survive only in his mangled, highly
eccentric versions.
Ratmansky is well aware that something needs to be done if the Bolshoi is to
reassert its classical credentials, but he also knows it will be a tricky
undertaking. Reclaiming the classics from the grip of Grigorovich, who
remains surprisingly popular despite his retirement, is not only expensive,
it’s also a political hot potato.
Ratmansky, though, is resolute. “ Swan Lake will be looked at,” he
promises, bringing cheer to all those who bemoaned Grigorovich’s
psychologically muddled version when it was performed at Covent Garden last
year. “It has to be done, because for 100 years Swan Lake hasn’t
been performed as Petipa, Ivanov or Tchaikovsky intended. Whether it’s done
by the Kirov or the Bolshoi, it just has to be done.”
— The Bolshoi Ballet opens at the Coliseum (0870 1450200, www.eno.org/bolshoi
) on July 30
