The Bolshoi Ballet stumbled on “Etudes. The premiere of the one-act ballets “The Cage” and “Etudes” took place at the Bolshoi Theater
"Cage, Etudes, Carmen Suite" is a fascinating ballet staged in the style of modern dance. Fans of choreographic art will be presented with three one-act ballets to the musical accompaniment of various composers. The ballet "The Cage" was staged by Jerome Robbins with musical accompaniment by I. Stravinsky. This is one of the oldest ballets, it was first staged in 1951, but is still revered by the public today. On the stage, all the subtleties of the ethnic rituals of the Amazons are revealed. Under the guidance of the queen, all the action is carried out for a teenage girl who knows her body. The performance "Russian Seasons" glorifies Slavic culture. Viewers are exposed to various calendar events that are now lost and little known to people. But this does not stop the ballet from being interesting and entertaining. "Etudes" - ballet by H. Lander to the musical accompaniment of K. Czerny. Everything that characterizes classical ballet is here - white tutus, elegance, bright solo performances.
An evening of ballet at the Bolshoi Theater will allow the audience to enjoy the wonderful performance of dance parts in a modern style. It is recommended to come to the ballet to all lovers of high choreographic art. And to buy tickets can be on our website.
A rich evening will be spent by those who buy tickets for the evening of one-act ballets at the Bolshoi Theater "Etudes", "Russian Seasons", "Cage" on our website.
"The Cage" and "Etudes" are premiere ballets. "The Cage" was prepared by choreographer Jerome Robbins, known for his bright projects on Broadway, in foreign theaters and cinemas.
The performance "Etudes" will tell you how dancers live, what makes up their life and how much effort is needed to achieve greatness and earn a standing ovation from the public.
The evening will end with the ballet "Russian Seasons", staged by Alexei Ratmansky. The extraordinary production will remind the audience of the roots, traditions and way of life of the Russian people and hint at the preservation of national values. The ballet to the music of Leonid Desyatnikov traveled to many countries and was highly appreciated everywhere both by professional critics and by a grateful audience.
Each of the ballets will require high performing skills, fortunately, leading artists will perform before the Russian audience, ready to amaze with complex numbers and combine the classics of ballet art with modern techniques.
Join the bright evening, you can buy tickets in advance for the best seats for "Etudes, Cage, Russian Seasons" at the Bolshoi Theater on this website.
Russian seasons
Choreographer - Alexei Ratmansky
Conductor - Igor Dronov
Costume designer — Galina Solovieva
Cell
Choreography by Jerome Robbins
Set design Jean Rosenthal
Costume Designer - Ruth Sobotka
Etudes
Choreography by Harald Lander
Scenography, costumes, lighting by Harald Lander
The Bolshoi Ballet presented two premieres. The artistic merits of The Cage in the choreography by Jerome Robbins are beyond doubt, but Etudes by Harald Lander can be considered a failure of the famous troupe - both the choice of the performance and its presentation are problematic.
In 1948, the Danish choreographer and teacher Harald Lander staged a class that dancers keep in shape on a daily basis. The director included in the performance all stages of ballet training - from the simplest movements at the barre to the most complex rotations and jumps. The premiere of "Etudes" took place in Lander's native Royal Danish Ballet, and then the opus went to troupes around the world. In 2004, he got to the Mariinsky Theatre, at that time it was directed by Makhar Vaziev, who is now the head of the Bolshoi Ballet. "Etudes" is his first big project in his new position.
As you watch, the conviction grows stronger that the director has firmly decided to eliminate the gaps in the education of his wards. And do it in public. From the usual class - someone is trying with might and main, something is not working out for someone - this one is distinguished by the set light, ceremonial costumes and the presence of clackers mechanically shouting out their “Bravo!”. And, of course, music - unlike Lander, the accompanists of the Bolshoi Theater have good taste. As for Igor Dronov, who stood at the premiere, he should have offered condolences. There is a suspicion that the maestro has not yet had to deal with such a weak score.
There can be no claims to the author of the original Carl Czerny. He wrote his exercises for students mastering the basics of piano playing, and did not set any artistic tasks for himself. The composer Knudage Riisager, who orchestrated the Etudes, proceeded from the quality of the material and did not make any effort to ennoble it - the brass rattles in its presentation, the strings squeal, the tutti falls on the innocent listener with the weight of a sledgehammer, separate polytonal moments, apparently introduced , with a parodic purpose, turn into an indecent cacophony.
Maestro Dronov, it seems, decided to get rid of this nightmare as soon as possible and ran the score one and a half times faster than it should be according to the metronome. The artists did not take up his initiative, but not because they delved into the details of the choreography, but because the choreography for the most part did not dance with them. I don't remember that in any premiere ballet the dancers of the Bolshoi, including the soloists, allowed so many blunders.
There are probably many reasons - a small number of rehearsals, and the abyss that separates the free Moscow school from the scrupulous Danish one, and the unwillingness to polish the craft directly in the auditorium. All this can be corrected over time - the question is, why?
You can join Danish values in such a masterpiece as La Sylphide: Johann Kobborg is staging at the Bolshoi. If there is a desire to bring a ballet class to the stage, the theater has its own pride - Asaf Messerer's "Class Concert", resumed by his nephew Mikhail. This apotheosis of grand Soviet style, framed by Dmitri Shostakovich's celebratory fanfare, is, in addition to all its merits, a very musical spectacle.
One can understand the pedagogical reasons of the head of the Bolshoi Ballet, but from the point of view of artistic aesthetics, the inclusion of Etudes in the repertoire is a more than strange move. The pianist, having decided to show off his technique, will not go out to the public with Czerny, but will play etudes by Chopin, Scriabin or Glass - the same genre, but at a qualitatively different level. The art of ballet also has its own "etudes" - inspirational hymns to pure skill not tied to the barre and other phases of training.
Why dancers master Lander when they have Balanchine (scarce, but represented in the Bolshoi's repertoire) and Forsythe (not in the Bolshoi Theater playbill) is a mystery to the author of these lines. Why the author .... "I can not penetrate into the nooks and crannies of the ballet mind," Diaghilev complained to Stravinsky, who seemed to have thoroughly studied ballet and its representatives.
By the way, about Stravinsky. A small, quarter-hour performance to his music became a pleasant impression of the evening. The title of the opus is "The Cage". The choreographer is Balanchine's colleague Jerome Robbins, known to the general public as the creator of West Side Story. The ballet has long lost its initial protest against aggressive feminism, and today its plot - a tribe of spider-Amazons lures male strangers into the web and eats them - can be interpreted as an ironic thriller.
The troupe of the Bolshoi already has experience in mastering stories from the life of insects. In 2009, British choreographer Wayne McGregor staged Chroma in Moscow. The director, however, insisted that his interpretation of the bodily goes back to impersonal computer graphics, but in fact he showed himself as a born entomologist. However, in that athletic ballet of power, the dancers of the Bolshoi Theater were too academic and obsessed with their own beauty. In Robbins' graceful, despite its "rigidity" ballet, these qualities proved to be in demand and fit well into the elegant "sound" of the Basel Concerto for String Orchestra.
Well, the culmination of the evening was the “Russian Seasons” by Leonid Desyatnikov and Alexei Ratmansky, which has been going on at the Bolshoi since 2008. The composition has been half updated, but the pleasure from this musical and choreographic masterpiece is the same value.
The Cage is one of Robbins' greatest ballets. In 1951, when this ballet began its life, critics were thrown into dismay by its ferocious fury. In Holland, the authorities even initially banned it - as "pornographic".
J. Homans, Apollo's Angels
In the spring of 1951, Robbins returned to the New York City Ballet again, and, according to him, applied the purely technical discoveries that he had realized in the musical The King and I* in his polemical ballet The Cage. He himself said that the over-extended Siamese movements and gestures that he used in the Broadway show overflowed and splashed into the ballet. Set to the dark music of Stravinsky's String Concerto in D major, this ballet tells how female insects "rape" and then kill male insects. The program offered "competition or cult" as an explanation. And, according to Robbins, the original idea went back to the mythological Amazons. But already at the very first rehearsals it was transformed, so that the “Amazons” turned into praying mantis-like insects indulging in their cult. Robbins also took something from spiders, from the unbridled power of the animal world, to create what he himself called "a natural phenomenon."
The idea of staging The Cage first came to his mind when, turning over a record of Stravinsky's Apollo Musagete, he saw on the reverse side the 1946 Concert "What a dramatic thing!" - such was his reaction. He described this music as "terribly exciting, overwhelming and subjugating" and imagined the three parts of the concerto as a dramatic structure, which later became the basis of his ballet. Robbins layered the dance with an endless number of ideas and images that he found and absorbed throughout the work on the ballet, from Nora Kay slicked wet hair **, out of the shower, to watching a tiger in a cage, relentlessly whipping with his tail. He also hinted that he was inspired by the peculiar youthful features - carefully traced by him - in the dance of Tanakil Le Clerc *** (he compared her to a clumsy young colt about to turn into a thoroughbred horse). He himself spoke of this Imagist **** absorption process as follows: “I had a special look aimed at the material. Such a "special look" is typical of anyone involved in creative work, be it an artist, playwright, poet, composer or choreographer. This “look” becomes a kind of Geiger counter that starts clicking in the brain or turns on emotions when you get close to some object that may be of value to your work.”
In such a case, the subject would probably have raised their eyebrows in surprise, as the ballet was deliberately threatening and violent. Summing up everything that happens in it, Robbins said: “This is a story about a tribe, a female tribe. A young girl, a Convert, must undergo a rite of passage. She does not yet know her duties and powers as a member of the tribe, nor is she aware of her natural instincts. She falls in love with a man and mates with him. But the rules by which the tribe lives require his death. She refuses to kill him, but is once again ordered by the (Queen of the Tribe) to do her duty. And when his blood really spills, animal instincts take over. She herself rushes forward to complete the sacrifice. Her feelings obey the instincts of her tribe."
And indeed, under the leadership of the Queen of the Tribe (Yvonne Munsee), two Strangers (Nicolas Magallanes, Michael Mol) were killed one by one by violent blows of women's hands and feet. If “Free as Air”***** expanded the classical “syllable” with a combination of pirouettes and somersaults, then “The Cage”, with its grotesque manner, should have pushed the boundaries of the classical form even further. “I didn’t have to limit myself solely to human movements, that is, movements made in the manner that we consider to be human,” Robbins recalled. - In the way their fingers worked, in the tilt of the body to the ground or the lunge of the arm, I had the opportunity to see what I wanted to compose. Sometimes arms, hands, fingers turned into claws, tentacles, antennae.<…>
The ballet premiered at the City Center on June 4, 1951. Artist Jean Rosenthal illuminated an empty web-like structure of intertwining ropes, and Ruth Sobotka dressed the performers in provocative "spider" robes. At the beginning of the ballet, the rope net dangling from above is eerily taut, a detail that Robbins added as if to warn of what is about to happen here. But this performance, less than fourteen minutes long, instantly crushes all the audience's assumptions.<…>
The reaction of the critics was very loud, but mostly in favor of Robbins. John Martin****** wrote: “This is an angry, piecemeal and merciless work, decadent in its obsession with misogyny and contempt for reproduction. It cannot avoid questions, but with its sharp and strong blows it penetrates to the very essence of the problem. The characters are insects, without a heart or conscience, and their opinion of the human race is not very high. But despite all the power of denial, this is a great little thing, marked with the stamp of genius. In the Herald Tribune, Walter Terry ****** concludes that "Robbins has created a startling, hard-hitting, but overall exciting piece."<…>
Clive Barnes****** later described The Cage as "a repulsive piece of ill-expressed genius". As if defending Robbins from accusations of misogyny, Lincoln Kernstein******* called it "the manifesto of the women's liberation movement, made twenty years before it began." At that time, Robbins was very hurt by such a harsh reaction and even issued a “rebuttal”: “I don’t understand why someone is so shocked by The Cage. If you look closely, it will become clear to you that it is nothing more than the second act of Giselle in the modern sense. And although he later explained that irony was implied in his statement, he was constantly “remembered” by the jeeps, vengeful spirits in female form, who brutally attacked Hilarion and Albert in the famous cemetery scene. But in The Cage there is no hint of the all-consuming power of love that helps Giselle save her unfaithful prince. Robbins made his ballet infinitely dark and ruthless: both of his Outsiders had to die without waiting for any manifestation of human emotions from their killers. Which was in line with Balanchine's advice, who, according to biographer Bernard Taper, told Robbins after the run, "Leave him clinically soulless."
An excerpt from G. Lawrence's "A Dance with Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins"
Translation by N. Shadrina
* "The King and I" - a musical based on the novel "Anna and the King of Siam", staged by J. Robbins on Broadway in 1951.
** Nora Kay is the first performer of the part of the Convert.
*** Tanakil Le Clerc is a ballerina of the New York City Ballet, who soon after the events described became the wife of J. Balanchine.
**** Imagist - inherent in Imagism (a literary trend in English-speaking countries).
***** Free as Air is one of the most famous ballets by J. Robbins (1944).
****** John Martin, Walter Terry, Clive Barnes are the greatest American ballet critics.
******* Lincoln Kerstein is a philanthropist, art connoisseur, writer, impresario, co-founder of the New York City Ballet Company.
