Imagining ballet d'action and Anacreonic periods

[GNicholls]

From what I've read, there are no ballets d'action and only two ballets from the Anacreonic period ("The Whims of Cupid ..." and "La Fille Mal Gardée") in any state of preservation. Does anyone know of a credible video giving a sense of what other ballets from the non-preserved era might have been like?

[rg]

neither WHIMS nor FILLE qualifies as an anacreontic ballet.

THE AWAKENING OF FLORA (1894, by Marius Petipa) does, however, as a hundred years-or-so-after throwback to the works of Charles Didelot and his earlier contemporaries who worked in the genre. Didelot's long-lost, 1796 FLORE ET ZEPHIRE lives in the history books as something of a "classic" from this era; the recent "reconstruction" of Petipa's FLORA by Vikharev for the Maryinsky Ballet was once on youtube but i don't know if it remained there or was taken down for copyright reasons.

there are, if mem. serves a number of comments on this staging here on BT.

[innopac]

Here is a link. Mrlopez2681 has put up some other wonderful videos that you might enjoy as well.

[Mel Johnson]

Although the two works cited are from the era when Anacreontic ballet was hot, as rg says, they're not actually the real deal. "Whims..." is a sort of parody of the genre, being a kind of satyr play on the general themes of Anacreonism. But for the modern audience, while "Whims" is fun, in a naughty sort of Politically Incorrect way, it's like trying to guess what all of Greek drama was like if Euripedes' Cyclops alone had survived from that time.