Translated material
Queen of classical dance
From the history of the ballet tutu
During the Bolshoi Theater's recent tour in London, the British press attracted close attention to the ballet novelty "The Corsair". Debra Crain specifically noted the period production's design in the Times: "The costumes are a striking combination of rich colors, copious embroidery and stunning tutus." Meanwhile, few domestic reviewers noted the unique artistic work, and the new costumes are not just good in themselves, they are a sign of a new trend in the development of the Bolshoi Theater.The author of these costumes, who invented them more than a hundred years ago, the artist of the Imperial Theaters Evgeniy Ponomarev, was an ethnographer-bibliophile; in designing outfits for merchants, slaves and pirates, he adhered to the historical accuracy of Greek and Moorish traditional clothes, and used only three colors - red, blue, white. But there were many shades of them.
Elena Zaitseva, who was currently restoring the appearance of the performance based on Ponomarev’s sketches, worked carefully on the project for more than a year. “We have stepped beyond today, when everyone saves money and time, and we sat, like serfs once did, embroidering a sundress for a whole year, and painstakingly made the design. If Virsaladze, the artist who ruled the Bolshoi stage in the second half of the twentieth century, was a genius of optical illusion, then Ponomarev is a genius of something real. What is depicted in his sketch is what you will see on stage. And bright, saturated colors have a right to exist in the theater; their non-use is a kind of timidity and insurance against failure,” she says. The last phrase is a continuation of the ongoing dispute: Eight years ago, Zaitseva restored the costumes for “The Sleeping Beauty” at the Mariinsky Theater, designed by Ivan Vsevolozhsky; These sketches at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries were criticized by Vladimir Telyakovsky, who replaced Vsevolozhsky as director of the Imperial Theaters, and a century later Vsevolozhsky received criticism from the current press for their color brightness, which was then still unusual for our academic theater scene. Most importantly, the ballerinas appeared on stage in elongated tutus covered with silk, immediately returning the effect of an ancient spectacle.
It is not visible from the audience that the tutu consists of flat, thin tulle skirts set horizontally on the dancer’s waist. Which, as if rising from a gust of wind, froze in different forms - “plates”, “bells” and many others. Historically, changes in ballet costume have naturally gone towards minimizing forms. The tutu originated from women's below-the-knee, empire-style skirts called "bells." And the “bell,” in turn, is a shortened version of the romantic tunic - a long skirt to the toes. These delicate costumes belong to the world of ghosts, jeeps, spirits in “La Sylphide”, “Giselle”, “Serenade”, and since the beginning of the twentieth century, since the time of “Chopiniana”, a transparent tunic in ballet colloquialism has been called “Chopin’s”. At Covent Garden, the corps de ballet of swans in Swan Lake still wear silver elongated tutus; they can hardly be called tutus, but they are very reminiscent of those depicted in surviving engravings. Unlike the white tutus accepted in our tradition, “floating” as if on the surface of a lake. Swan tutus, as well as a headdress made of feathers (in ballet slang, “earphones”), were invented by the same Ponomarev, noted by the English press, from whose works one can study the era of the late 19th century and whose costume sketches for a large number of productions have been preserved in the St. Petersburg Theater Library.
If in the time of Anna Pavlova the tutus were long and fluffy, then they became shorter and even shorter, and later longer but thinner. In this transformation, it is not difficult to trace the ballet fashion of each era, which, in turn, reflected “high fashion.” The beginning of the century is a modern, hedonistic and sophisticated style, which is why the tutus are richly decorated with real feathers or precious stones. Pavlova's costumes were modeled by fashion trendsetter Lev Bakst; he also sewed her casual clothes. The experience of the Russian-European avant-garde passed by our ballet (but by no means theatrical) fashion - only in Diaghilev’s enterprise were examples of constructivism (people-skyscrapers in Picasso’s “Parade”) and Suprematism (the monochrome of Natalia Goncharova’s ritual clothing in “Les Noces” found in costumes) ), Chanel fashion influence (in sports beach suits from The Blue Express). And yet, sometimes the art of ballet costume reached constructivist heights (the most striking example is “Bolt” by Tatiana Bruni, but the sad fate of the production severely decided the fate of the artistic design).
The utilitarian simplified packs of the early Soviet years looked quite ascetic - the airy wavy line should not have evoked bourgeois associations. The 50s and 60s - the years of the “new wave” in European art coincided with the first foreign tours of our decorated theaters and brought fashion for a universal mini: ballerinas in narrow tutus appeared in ballet palaces and dreams. In the 70s and 80s their width increased, but they somehow became discolored by lack of style - as if a reflection of the years of dull calm, at the same time “stagnation” and “underground”, official art.
There are cases when costumes “ruined” a ballet, and, conversely, high-quality choreography will never be deterred by laconic clothing. Thus, in the middle of the 20th century, leotards and tights came into ballet fashion - not just universal rehearsal clothes for dancers, but the signature stage costume of the Balanchine school. The black leotard became synonymous with his “black” ballets (“Agon”, “Four Temperaments”, “Symphony in Three Movements”); Balanchine also had flat tutus of unimaginable contours under the gastronomic name “plates”, echoing the curves of the wide-brimmed hats in the “Symphony of the Far West”. After the tour of the Balanchine troupe of the New York City Ballet, they began to look at ballet with different eyes in the USSR, they even began to dress differently for class: before that, women practiced in tunics made of gauze, and men in whatever they had to. More precisely, the first step in this direction was taken by the visits to Moscow of the Royal Ballet and the Paris Opera in the late 1950s. By this time, Yuri Grigorovich’s “Stone Flower” had just bloomed in Leningrad: no traditional costumes - Simon Virsaladze pulled the Mistress of the Copper Mountain into a spotted jumpsuit. Then there was “The Legend of Love”, after which the fashion for tight-fitting ballet leotards, like a second skin, was established for a long time.
Meanwhile, tutus still occupy the place of the queen in the state of classical ballet. Until recently, there were structural differences in their cut in Moscow and St. Petersburg: at the level of skirt shapes, outlines, number of flounces and styling. It is important that the packs of swans in St. Petersburg-Leningrad from time immemorial differed from the Nereids in The Sleeping Beauty or the shadows in La Bayadère. And the Bolshoi in Moscow at one time emphasized its distinctiveness as an imperial theater by uniform “all-terrain” packs for all classical performances: for “Raymonda”, “Sleeping” and “Swan Lake”.
But, as time shows, it is not only fashion that is changing, because costumes of different cuts began to return to Bolshoi performances. And the tutus in the shape of open buds in “The Corsair,” the theater’s last major premiere, referencing imperial times, say as much about the theater as they do about the whole country.