Translated material
Waiting for Maslenitsa
La Sylphide has been updated at the Bolshoi Theater
The ballet about the Scotsman James, who on the eve of his wedding ran away from his bride into a magical forest following a white-winged sylph girl, was first staged by the Frenchman Filippo Taglioni in 1832 for his daughter Maria and four years later re-composed by the Dane Augustus Bournonville (both the music and the choreography were different , only the plot remains). Ballet appeared and disappeared many times on the national stage. Until recently, the Bolshoi hosted the edit of Elsa Marianne von Rosen, and it was homely, comfortable, free: the performers spent years adjusting the text to suit themselves, each telling the story they wanted. Nikolai Tsiskaridze - about an earthly man who realized his kinship with the air (the main character was slightly obscured in this version), Maria Alexandrova - about the joy of lassoing, the excitement of catching (on stage it was more like Diana the huntress than a sylph), Nadezhda Gracheva - about self-sufficiency of the ballet drawing, that the fate of the sylph is the fate of the ballerina. The show featured top-notch actors and was completely different every night. Often he departed quite far from the Danish original (and it was Bournonville’s version that was preserved in history; Taglioni’s version disappeared, and only at the end of the twentieth century was it reconstructed in France by Pierre Lacotte), and now, in an era of passion for historical accuracy and archival research, the artistic director of the Bolshoi ballet Alexei Ratmansky invited Johan Kobborg to the theater to bring the performance into line with the Danish tradition.The former premier of the Royal Danish Ballet, now working at London's Covent Garden, did everything he could. First of all, he added a lot of details to the first act of La Sylphide, and wrote out tiny roles for almost “wordless”, non-dancing characters. And if earlier the story played out in an almost empty (not physically empty, the corps de ballet was present, but was almost invisible) space, where all the movements of the heroes were automatically enlarged, now James has a house full of people, you can’t always see him among the crowd.
The house lives its own life, the house is preparing for the wedding - here are two guys in detail, slowly, lighting the candles on the chandelier, then raising it up just as slowly. The groom's tired (after the bachelor party?) friends are sleeping at the table, and the hero's first meeting with the sylph takes place in their emotionless presence. When the guests begin to dance, a whole orchestra appears on the stage: in the left corner a venerable bagpiper is puffing out his cheeks, in the right corner a violinist is playing, and on the second floor balcony another bagpiper and a flautist are trying. (Of course, all these are just toys: a real orchestra, led by Pavel Klinichev, as it should be, is in the pit.) In addition to the dances of the main characters and the corps de ballet, a harmonious pas de sis is built on the stage - perhaps one of the best fragments of the performance. Three dancers (Anastasia Stashkevich, Ksenia Kern, Anna Tikhomirova) and three dancers (Dmitry Zagrebin, Anton Kuznetsov, Igor Tsvirko) flaunt accuracy in reproducing small designs, and for the men this accuracy turns out to be of the highest standard.
Kobborg believes (and has said this more than once) that this whole story could only take place in James’s imagination, that the sylph is a list of James’ questions to himself and to the world. Is he happy, does he want to get married? But to confirm this concept, Kobborg did not correct the old choreography, he corrected only small (but significant) game details. For example, when Gurn (Denis Savin), who is in love with James’s bride, sees James chasing a sylph, this Gurn does not look at the flying girl (which would be natural), but only at James, who is writing a strange trajectory.
The performance is clear, well-designed, and well-dressed (designer Peter Farmer did a great job). There was just one problem with the premiere - there was neither James nor the Sylph in it.
Vyacheslav Lopatin, who got the main role, tried at all costs to jump higher and stronger. Strong as a peasant, but puffed up like a bad boy, he jumped around the stage with a cast-iron cannonball and smashed the openwork text into fragments. And Natalya Osipova, a dancer replacing Anastasia Volochkova in the role of a glamorous secretary, tried so hard to seduce her partner that the real friends of businessmen who filled the stalls clung to their companions tighter - to avoid, so to speak. The ballet turned into a story about how a cunning girl dragged away a dull but rich guy, that is, from the space of a romantic novel we found ourselves in the space of Cosmopolitan magazine.
However, the situation is not hopeless - in the cast of “La La Sylphide” there is also Ekaterina Krysanova, in whose best roles the combination of timidity and courage necessary for a flying girl is noticeable, there is Nelly Kobakhidze, who always draws out the roles with a fine pen, there is the best sylph of the Bolshoi, Anastasia Goryacheva, who reproduces all the little things graphics as if she studied at the Paris Opera school, and not at MAHA. (However, according to rumors, Goryacheva was staged in a festive “closed” performance, so that only soldiers specially brought to the theater will see her.) So Johan Kobborg should not be upset - it’s only worth it, in addition to a few Russian words learned during rehearsals, add the saying “The first pancake is lumpy.”