Diana & Actaeon

[BalletNut]

I have a couple of questions about the Diana & Actaeon pdd (hope I spelled it right) which seems to be a staple of ballet competitions and gala performances. When was it first performed, and who danced it? Is it just a "party piece" or is it an excerpt from a longer ballet? If it is an excerpt, what is the context of it, i.e. what's the plot of the ballet and what do these two characters have to do with anything?

Thanks in advance for indulging my curiosity.

[Mel Johnson]

This divertissement was choreographed in 1935 by Agrippina Vaganova to music that had been excerpted from Cesare Pugni's score for Esmeralda. It has no relation to the plot of the score from which it is taken.

[rg]

to add a few details to mel's informative post, the precedent for Vaganova's 'Pas de Deux" was a "Pas de Deux a Trois" in an earlier ballet: LE ROI CANDAULES, in which there was a related number, perhaps to the same music (a Pugni interpolation, i think) for three dancers appearing as Diana (a famous role of Anna Pavlova's), Endymion (a.k.a. Akteon), and a Satyr - this last named role was danced by Georgi Balanchivadze in a concert program in Petrograd in 1923.

I have no idea if the choreography for this pervious number was related in any to Vaganova's originally created for Galina Ulanova and Vahktang Chabukiani.

[Mel Johnson]

And there is some literary pretext for attaching this number to Esmeralda, as well. After he had written Notre Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo also wrote and illustrated La Legende des Siecles, which contains the Diana/Acteon story.

[BalletIsLife]

Side note:

How do you properly pronouce Actaeon?

[Mel Johnson]

The name is usually rendered Acteon, so:

If you are a Classical Greek, you say it ak-TAY-on, but since she's Diana and not Artemis, you are probably a Roman and would say AK-tay-on. If you were a real dyed-in-the-wool Classical Greek, though, you would call him en-DUM-yon. (The "y" in Endymion stands for an upsilon.)