A modern ballet with music by cult US rock band The White Stripes has wowed Bolshoi Theater audiences, helping the company shake off a conservative image as it plans a return to its historic home.
Chroma, British choreographer Wayne McGregor’s 2006 exploration of the influence of psychology on movement that he created for Britain’s Royal Ballet, is a sharp contrast to the 19th-century narrative ballets that have been the staple of the Bolshoi repertoire.
Set to a pulsating, dissonant score of orchestrations of White Stripes songs as well as original music by British composer Joby Talbot, Chroma demands from its 10 performers a whole new vocabulary of dance.
Photo: AFP
Legs are flung out in extensions at all angles, arms whirled through the air and dancers intertwined in intricate couplings. The set resembles a gigantic white box with an open back whose color changes throughout the show.
With no tutu or pair of tights in sight, the dancers wear thin drapes that merge with their own bodies in a world that inhabits a different universe to the ritual formality of The Sleeping Beauty or Don Quixote.
However, the Moscow dancers and audiences have embraced the work’s stark modernity, earning the ballet’s creative team a rousing reception at its July 21 premiere.
“For the Bolshoi Ballet, Chroma is a breakthrough into a new era,” wrote Tatyana Kuznetsova, the ballet critic of the Kommersant newspaper. “The troupe has jumped into the 21st century.”
McGregor, who came to Moscow to rehearse the dancers, expressed amazement at their abilities and is now set to choreograph a new version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring specially for the Bolshoi in 2013.
“It’s a fantastic time for the Bolshoi to be experimenting with very modern choreography,” McGregor said. “They have these incredible dancers who can really do anything, so why not explore it. The dancers have great proportions, amazing limbs and they can do extraordinary things with their bodies — they have a real kind of elasticity, which is something that I really love.”
Artem Ovcharenko, one of the soloists in Chroma, said: “You hear the first chords of that music standing in the wings. You start to burn, you want to get on stage and to dance to this.”
The success of Chroma has come at a crucial time for the Bolshoi company which has in recent years been accused of being held back by its own traditions and being afraid of experimentation.
On Oct. 28, it is finally to resume performances in its historic theater, which closed in July 2005 for urgent restoration, the completion of which was embarrassingly put back year after year. In the interim, the company has performed on its New Stage theater nearby, whose smaller proportions have frustrated some of its stars.
The Bolshoi Ballet — run for three decades from its Soviet -heyday until 1995 by the -authoritarian Yuri Grigorovich — has endured a rocky time since the 2008 departure of modernizing director Alexei Ratmansky.
Ratmansky left allegedly because he fell out with the pro-Grigorovich old guard and the company appeared to tread water after his departure. This year a top candidate to become the new artistic director became embroiled in a dark campaign to smear him using pornographic images.
However, the Bolshoi then scored a coup by appointing as ballet director former dancer Sergei Filin, who had turned Moscow’s Stanislavsky Musical Theater into a rival of its more famous -counterpart by promoting innovative dance.
Along with Chroma, there is a new freshness in the repertoire of the Bolshoi, which has also taken on its first ballet by iconic Germany-based US choreographer William Forsythe.
The one-act Chroma is coupled in a thrilling evening of dance with the 1978 Symphony of Psalms by Czech choreographer Jiri Kylian, another new Bolshoi acquisition, and Rubies by George Balanchine, the Russian-born co-founder of New York City Ballet, who is only now being re-discovered in his homeland after his death in 1983.
“Five years ago it was hard to imagine that the Bolshoi would ever present Forsythe, Kylian or McGregor,” wrote critic Anna Galaida in the daily Vedomosti. “Now we have had premieres by all of these stars at the Bolshoi in one season.”
Meanwhile, the Bolshoi boasts possibly the most sought-after young dancers in ballet in Ivan Vasiliev and Natalya Osipova, a real-life couple who have dazzled the world with their heart-stopping jumps and dizzying spins.
Filin said the dancers had initially been nervous of the difficulties of McGregor’s choreography, but said he had now given the company whole new possibilities.
“We got even more than a McGregor ballet. We got artists who are capable of working and delivering a very great result.”
Traditions, however, are not entirely dead at the Bolshoi.
According to the theater’s general director Anatoly Iksanov, the first full-length ballet to go on show at the reopened theater will be The Sleeping Beauty, in an updated production of Grigorovich’s Soviet-era version.
Additional reporting by staff writer
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
A team of doctors and vets in Pakistan has developed a novel treatment for a pair of elephants with tuberculosis (TB) that involves feeding them at least 400 pills a day. The jumbo effort at the Karachi Safari Park involves administering the tablets — the same as those used to treat TB in humans — hidden inside food ranging from apples and bananas, to Pakistani sweets. The amount of medication is adjusted to account for the weight of the 4,000kg elephants. However, it has taken Madhubala and Malika several weeks to settle into the treatment after spitting out the first few doses they
RSS