Pharaoh's Daughter

[volcanohunter]

7 hours ago, Fosca said:

Both productions, Bolshoi and Munich, cared very much for the music and wanted to reconstruct the original partitura by Adam with the additions by Pugni, Drigo et al.

For me it's a maddening feature of ballet in general that music can be considered more sacrosanct than choreography. (Easier to preserve, yes, but what good does it do ballet when an old score is discovered in a library but the steps are lost?)

7 hours ago, Fosca said:

...of course he was convinced that he as a Russian had the ultimate understanding for the execution of the notated steps.

Ironic, then, that he seems to have no successor in Russia, which hired a scab from the opposite side of the continent. 

[doug]

A note on the Stepanov notations: They are unambiguous insofar as the material documented. There is only one way to read the system. Ambiguities lie where material is omitted (often upper body) and sometimes in how the steps fit the music (partiularly in adagio). But a glissade is a glissade, a jeté is a jeté, a ballonné is a ballonné, and so forth.

Burlaka set the Bolshoi Corsaire choreography and didn't follow the notated steps. I don't know why, but this is his usual MO. Ratmansky didn't read the notation at that point and was unaware of that. For my work at Bavarian State Ballet, I was a consultant and not a stager. I showed the notated choreography but some of it was subsequently altered, embellished, and revised. For other numbers, I was asked to work with scores that didn't fit the notated choreography. There were multiple goals for the production and revival of choreography was only one among several. That's the frustration of being a consultant and not having the final say.

[Fosca]

Burlaka claimed to know the tradition, the history of the Corsaire choreography in Russia/the Soviet Union, and was relying on that. He seemed to have an extensive knowledge about it though.

Reading the documentation of the Munich Petipa symposium, I now realise that this was the early stage of ballet reconstruction, and also the beginning of different opinions about how to do it.

13 hours ago, volcanohunter said:

Ironic, then, that he seems to have no successor in Russia, which hired a scab from the opposite side of the continent

It was not Russia, it was Yuri Fateev - who once had thrown out Vikharev's Sleeping Beauty reconstruction but somehow changed his mind about the old ballets. Does anybody know why he did so?

[Danielle]

A few snippets of the production posted on Tony Candeloro's Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/reel/CrJnV4xoiv-/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

I don't have the translation but we get to a few glimpses of the dancing. The first shot looks pretty cool!

[volcanohunter]

How did it feel when you first saw videos of “The Pharaoh’s Daughter,” which you and your wife, Tatiana, had worked on for two years?

It was really painful. It was a longtime dream of mine to do it. It was a lot of preparatory work.

But it’s nothing compared to the war. No one dies. It’s just a ballet. They take a ballet, OK, they take a ballet. They don’t write my name on the production, well, that’s bad. It’s wrong on so many levels. But it’s nothing compared to the real tragedy that is going on every single day.

How can you be sure that the Mariinsky used your choreography?

The work that I did was very specific. It was a reconstruction from the notations. Its steps, combinations of steps, arm movements, gestures and how the steps are connected to the music. There are parts that are now very different. But they just built it on top of the work that I had done.

In the video, I saw moments that couldn’t have been found anywhere else. The dancers worked on these steps for months. It’s in their bodies.

[...]

Have you had any communication with the Bolshoi or the Mariinsky since you left Russia?

Not long ago, the Mariinsky sent a letter from one of the clerks in a production office. They said that they spent money on us, on me and my wife living there, and that we would need to pay back that money — the hotel, the overseas flights. Of course, they perform ballets of mine without my name, and they don’t pay any royalties. So that was an interesting letter.

Did you respond?

I didn’t. I don’t know what to say.

Everything used to be according to contract, but it was so easy for them to break a contract, to deprive an artist of intellectual property.