Translated material
Unplanned starfall
The 7th Mariinsky Ballet Festival opens today
This festival should not have happened at all: it was assumed that this spring the theater would be closed for reconstruction, the troupe would divide its time between numerous tours and performances at other venues in St. Petersburg and there would be nowhere to receive guests. But the reconstruction has gone somewhere into the future, and here you go - another festival. Built according to a familiar, well-developed scheme: the Mariinsky’s own premieres plus world stars in repertoire performances.Today and tomorrow in the Russian Project program. The evening is built on contrast: starting with Balanchine’s Apollo, which has long existed in the repertoire, it will continue with a new ballet by Alexei Miroshnichenko and a new reconstruction by Sergei Vikharev. More precisely, Miroshnichenko (a former dancer at the Mariinsky Theater who worked as a tutor on William Forsythe’s ballets, and rigid fragments of Forsythe’s constructions are now bristling in all his works) will even present two ballets: today - “Like an Old Organ Grinder” to the music of Leonid Desyatnikov, tomorrow - “Ring” " to music by 2H Company. The soloist in both works will be Daria Pavlenko, who is invariably responsible for all risky experiments at the Mariinsky Theater. Vikharev’s reconstruction of “The Awakening of Flora,” the 1894 ballet made by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov (certainly lush and colorful, as Petipa’s ballets were, as Vikharev restores them, having already taken apart the colorful layers on “The Sleeping Beauty” and “La Bayadère”) , designed for Evgenia Obraztsova.
Following the premieres are visits from guests. The best couple of the English Royal Ballet - Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg - will appear in Romeo and Juliet, and the Paris Opera's étoile Mathieu Gagno will appear in Giselle (St. Petersburg manages to get the youngest Parisian star for the second time - last year festival, he danced “Don Quixote”; thereby the Mariinsky Theater again casually mocks the Bolshoi Theater, which, according to rumors, tried to organize Gagno’s tour in Moscow, but failed to do so). In the evening of Balanchine ballets (“Serenade”, “Prodigal Son”, “Diamonds”) there will appear representatives of the Balanchine citadel, the New York City Ballet - the first ballerina of the theater Maria Kowroski and two typical Balanchine dancers - the neat and always retreating into the ballerina’s shadow Philip Neil and the gambling virtuoso Damien Wetzel.
The special guest of the festival will be the Bolshoi Theater - Muscovites will take on tour an evening of one-acts, composed of premieres of the past and current seasons: “The Game of Cards” by Alexei Ratmansky, Misericordes by Christopher Wheeldon and “In the Room at the Top” by Twyla Tharp. In addition, the program includes a performance that promises to become historic: in “La Bayadère” the leaders of the two theaters will meet for the first time. Ulyana Lopatkina will be Nikiya, Nikolai Tsiskaridze will be Solor; If we also take into account that the second most important female role, the role of Gamzatti, will go to one of the best Moscow ballerinas, Maria Alexandrova, it becomes clear that La Bayadère will be the most exciting evening of the festival.
Of the festival's sorrows, the main one is the absence of Diana Vishneva; The ballerina begins her season at the American Ballet Theater in May and has already left for rehearsals. Of the bewilderments, there is the absence of a program for the gala concert that ends the festival: nothing is known for two weeks, negotiations with the management continue (everything must have dragged on so long precisely because the decision to hold the festival was made too late). But what has been announced again promises to make the festival the main ballet event of the year in Russia.