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Berlin Opera Ballet "Nutcracker" 1892 Reconstruction pics


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regarding the 1892 aspect of this staging, Burlaka told a Moscow historian who wrote me and who asked me to post it on this site, which i recall doing though i cannot locate it now, that while aiming to recreate the 1892 designs, Burlaka was not aiming to recreate a 'reconstruction' of the Petipa/Ivanov choreographic plan for the ballet.

from these stills it would seem that the choreography here owes a debt to Vainonen and perhaps to Peter Wright's staging now at the Royal Ballet, as well as it includes such original touches as having the Sugar Plum Fairy and Prince Coqueluche appear as dancing dolls in the first act's parlor/party scene.

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I suspect they used the PDD in the form it is presented in Wright's or all those derived from Fedorova's staging. In that case, that is a major view at the original, and something that doesn't need too much digging, given that it has been beautifully preserved all this years. I would like to see also what did they do with the Snow scene and Waltz of the flowers, although even if not fallowing the notations, just presenting the original costume designs is more than enough to honor this ballet's past.

One thing I feel curious about about Nutcracker treatment is the way stagers try to give solution to the big problem of how to make sense of the absence of its main dancers from the 90 % of the duration of the production. It looks like here
Burlaka decided to be faithful to the original-(just as Balanchine, Wright and Fedorova)-by using the main ballerina just for the PDD and presenting another girl as Clara-(although I notice from the pictures that this is a "dancing Clara" as with Wright's and Alonso, a teen on pointes instead of the demi character little Balanchine's heroine). The one element similar to Vainonen's vision is, for what I read there, the fact that little Clara BECOMES the Fee Dragee, which is not a Fee anymore, but instead Princess Sugar Plum.

Good news...Prince Coqueluche is back! Yaay! (Would this be the very first production either in the XX or XXI Century in which this character' s original name reappears...?)

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