| A restored Nijinsky ballet will be brought from Rome to Moscow The Roman Opera Ballet, which will arrive in Moscow in a month, on the New Stage of the Bolshoi Theater, is not one of the majestic and magnificent troupes. Andris Liepa, who invited journalists to a press conference dedicated to this tour (organized by the Maris Liepa Foundation and the Cherry Forest open arts festival), diplomatically avoided the question of the current state of Italian ballet. Nevertheless, the upcoming tour may well become the sensation of the year, because for the first time in Russia this modest troupe will dance Vaslav Nijinsky’s mysterious ballet “Games” (music by Claude Debussy, set design by Lev Bakst).
In May it will be ninety years since the Paris premiere, when Nijinsky first combined tennis with flirting on stage. In his later, already crazy recordings, he “deciphered” the plot trio: two dancers meant two young men, the dancer meant Diaghilev. The premiere was noisy, but then the ballet froze under the crust of decades, only legends told about it. Only seven years ago, American restorers - choreographer Millicent Hodson and artist Kenneth Archer - returned it to the stage.
This is not their first work of this kind: they acquired a reputation as honest researchers and painstaking restorers 15 years ago, restoring Nijinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” for the American “Geoffrey Ballet”. (The performance was then reproduced in Rome - and will also come to us; and in June the same version is being premiered by the Mariinsky Theater.) Together with "Games" and "Spring", the Italians will show "Scheherazade" - the well-known Fokine, restored - dreamed up by Andris Liepa (Ilze Liepa and Nikolai Tsiskaridze will dance) and another small ballet - “The Death of Isadora Duncan”. It is tied to the Diaghilev era only by the name of the main character - this is a very recent production. Millicent Hodson composed a little story for Carla Fracci: the great ballerina of the sixties, who two years ago headed the Rome Opera Ballet, does not want to leave the stage. Andris Liepa also said that he dreams of showing in Moscow the recent premiere of the Romans - “Hamlet”, where Fracci plays the main role, and all the rest are given to men. But that's for next time. Anna GORDEEVA |
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