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Petipa and Balanchine: Use of the Diagonal?


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Recently, seeing the Kirov's Bayadere, Swan Lake and Don Q -- while my ideas of "classical ballet" have (chronologically backwards) have been formed by City Ballet and Balanchine --

I was struck by how much more the Kirov's productions "After Petipa" seemed to utilize bringing the dancers straight up the stage towards the audience. That is, as opposed to using the dancers on the diagonal. Or, putting it the other way around, it seemed to me that diagonals were used much less in the Kirov's "After Petipa" productions than in Balanchine.

And, while the diagonal allows one always to see a dancer in three dimensions from all points in the audience, bringing the dancers straight from stage rear to stage front also has a great charm and certain steps and enchainements not only appear to great effect that way, but, particulary given the very deep (some say too deep) stage at the Met in NY, it was very effective and there is great inherent drama in seeing the dancers come right at you up the stage.

So my question is, did I imagine this? Or is it only an artifact of having seen just those particular post-Petipa ballets? Or did Balanchine in fact use the diagonal more than Petipa and move away from Petipa's "back-to-front" orientation in reworking Petipa's classics? (In fact, isn't spacial complexity something that marks off Balanchine from his predecessors generally?).

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