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International Petipa Colloquium Bordeaux October 2015


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As you surmised Drew I said "informed by" knowledge of past performance practice for the very reasons that you outlined. We can not alter dancers physically but perhaps recruiting a wider range of physical types into training would assist as would attempting to cast dancers who are suited to the type of variation to be danced rather than the one size fits all casting that we so often see....

We have all become used to the edited highlights/ Olympic competition performance of Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake in which the choreographic text seems to be placed at the service of the dancers' technique rather than the dancers placing their technical skills at the service of the choreographer. We seem not only to have accepted that new tours de force should be incorporated into Petipa's works because of the "technical advances"that have taken place since they were created but that the music should be distorted in order to accommodate them. ...

There seem to be a lot of people about who seem to think that the only bits of Petipa's ballets that are worth showing are the sections which contain obvious dance,even if they then proceed to mangle them to suit current tastes and expectations. The stager has the ability to choose between edited highlights or staging the choreographic context in which Petipa intended them to appear. After all if the choreographer stages a procession or mime sequence that is as much his choreography as are the more obvious dance numbers. ...Needless to say I have friends who would happily see it disappear altogether because "it is boring and contains no dancing".

(On deValois) She said that in her production she was restoring the text that the company had previously danced with some modifications all of which were carefully recorded.

You make a number of cogent points here -- I'm just commenting on one part.

We've had many lively discussions on this board about the changing nature of virtuosity, and the Petipa ballets are often the place where these changes are most easily seen. Improvements in flexibility, strength, coordination and more over time have been incorporated into works and roles that have been identified as both classics (exemplifying classic qualities) and as opportunities to display technical skills. These two roles are coming into conflict as the shift in emphasis that you describe above continues.

Ratmansky's reconstruction of Sleeping Beauty is a place where these conflicting goals really come into focus. The variety of response, in the critical community as well as the general audience, makes powerful arguments for both sides The chance to see the work as the choreographer originally set it is a very seductive opportunity for enthusiasts and historians. Many people have compared this to the original instruments discussions in the early music community, and it's a pointy analogy.

But other people argue persuasively for the evolutionary model. Petipa himself was known for his interest in technical skills -- wouldn't he want dancers to do their most astonishing work in the places that he created for that kind of display? Or, to adapt a phrase from elsewhere in the world right now, faced with contemporary dancers, "what would Petipa do?"

I do not pretend to know (though there are scholars out there who could make an informed guess) -- in my role as greedy girl, I want to see all of the above options. Which means that I want people to dig into the historical record and use that information in performance, as well as polishing their fanciest steps to perform them in other productions of these works. I know that in general, I'm more engaged by the reconstructions, but I do want to know what people might do with the modernized versions.

It occurs to me that, in a dance world where so many ballet companies are looking to other dance forms to provide variety or a sense of the new to their repertories, they could consider looking to the past as the newest thing around, and stage these vintage works for their novelty-seeking audiences.

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Evolution, unfortunately, connotes only movement forward, even if that's not what it means. Ballet technique has evolved, but my main objection is that evolution is characterized as forward progress in every way. This is belied by the original tempi and the steps that the dancers of the time mastered that are exceedingly difficult to perform with precision and at those tempi and with the appropriate character and style. It's not where the focus of today's training is, although the school for the Danish Royal Ballet probably has the most.

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Exactly. The evolution, for better or worse, of ballet technique has included marked degradation in certain areas, notably speed, footwork and épaulement, as well as frequently grotesque distortions of skeletal alignment.

Regarding the 1970s telecast of the Royal's Sleeping Beauty, if anyone has filmed a better or faster version of the Canary variation than Lesley Collier's, I would certainly like to see it!

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The first post-war production of Sleeping Beauty for the Sadler's Wells/Royal Ballet was by de Valois and based on the version Sergeyev mounted in 1939. Then in 1968 came Peter Wright's Victorian Gothic production. That was superseded in 1973 with a production by Kenneth MacMillan which wasn't much liked. In 1977 Norman Morrice asked de Valois to mount yet another production with designs by David Walker - this is the one Ashton Fan refers to with Merle Park as Aurora and David Wall as Florimund. In 1994 came Anthony Dowell's production with designs by Maria Bjornsen, which premiered in Washington, Then finally Monica Mason's production which is still being given. Both Ashton and MacMillan contributed choreography to the various productions and the current version has a Garland dance by Christopher Wheeldon. But, as I said, Ashton was never asked to produce the ballet.

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I thought I remembered Ashton's name among the paragraph-long list of credits in the current production and assumed he had done one from which they mined something for the current mishmash, like "Someone else's 'Swan Lake,' but, back by popular demand, Ashton's 'Neapolitan Dance.'" It's good to have the record straight.

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Thanks Alymer--I had.always just thought Ashton when I thought of that production (and de Nobili). (He was Director of the company at that time. When you say he was never asked to produce Sleeping Beauty...would he not have had the authority to do one had he wished? I don't know the ins and outs of the Royal Ballet at that time, though I understand he felt a bit pushed out.)

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