Pavillon d'Armide

[Guest TosaBeth]

Hello-

This may be the wrong forum for this - *sorry* - I'm a newbie. But does anyone know if there's a video out of Pavillon d'Armide? I'm falling in love with the colorful score! Thanks.

[Mel Johnson]

Alas, I don't believe that any part of Fokine's choreography for that survives, let alone a video of it.

[doug]

The video documentary about Alexandra Danilova, Reflections of a Dancer, includes rehearsal clips of her staging of excerpts of Pavillon d'Armide for SAB. You could watch the Workshop performance from whatever that year was at the NYPL. One of the variations is a Soviet Paquita standard and is given complete in the documentary. So interesting to see Danilova's version -- faster and more fleet -- compared to the Soviet version - slower and more technical. Really demonstrates one of the major differences between Imperial-era choreography and Soviet-era revisions in a nutshell.

[Mel Johnson]

I can't imagine where she picked it up. Did "Pavilion" travel back to Russia, or did it survive longer than I thought in Diaghilev's repertoire?

I remember when Danilova came on regular faculty at SAB, and she started showing the kids bits and pieces of Don Quixote which in the early 1960s, was mostly terra incognita to most Americans, except for the pas de deux.

[doug]

I don't have Roland John Wiley's A Century of Russian Ballet at hand, but Pavillon is the last libretto included in the book. It premiered in Russia and maybe parts of it were kept in rep in the Company or at least in the School during Danilova's days.

[Alymer]

Danilova also mounted an extract from Pavillion d'Armide for a gala in Hamburg in 1965. The cast was Marina Eglevsky, Marianne Kruse, Zhandra Rodriguez and Michael Barishnikov. I remember his variation - the one created for Nijinsky - began with a huge sideways jump.

And when the Kirov came to London in 1970 Barishnikov and Yelena Yevteyeva did a pas de deux described as being from Coppelia. Her variation used completely different music and choreography to anything I'd ever seen described as Delibes or Coppelia and were later told that it was actually from Pavillion d'Armide. As Doug suggests, parts of the ballet must have survived within the company.

[jose manuel]

I have a recording from russian tv of a pas de trois from le pavillon d´armide

it is wonderful

jose manuel

[doug]

The score of Le Pavillon d'Armide has been recorded by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra and released on Marco Polo 8.223779. The CD includes a variation that has made its way into the Paquita Grand Pas. The choreography for the variation, as danced today by the Kirov, seems to be an embellishment (in this case, technically more difficult but with less overall movement) of what Alexandra Danilova taught in the video I mentioned above.