Live Stream of La Bayadere

[California]

Friday, March 29 at 7:30pm EDT: livestream of the world premiere of Phil Chan and Doug Fullington’s Star on the Rise: La Bayadère Reimagined! featuring Marius Petipa’s choreography revived from notation, and a newly orchestrated Ludwig Minkus score by Larry Moore. Indiana University’s website: https://iumusiclive.music.indiana.edu/#/

[volcanohunter]

Cool! Thank you for the link.

[doug]

Other performance will also be streamed (Saturday, March 30 @ 2:00 and 7:30 PM EDT), and I believe the streams (once edited) will be available for viewing on the same site for several weeks after the performances.

For those interested, I've made a page on my website with information about Star on the Rise: https://www.dougfullington.com/star-on-the-rise

[California]

I just watched the Friday evening performance and urge that everybody take a look at the performances on Saturday.

I confess that it was challenging watching Act I -- very familiar music, much familiar choreography, but I was confused by the characters and narrative (probably my fault). I kept wishing for a simultaneous split screen to remember what the original choreography looked like for different musical passages. I suppose this is a problem for people very familiar with the original, or what counts as the "original" that we've seen in recent decades. 

The second act after the intermissions was a relief in many ways! The entrance for Kingdom of the Shades, with dancers in short white tutus coming down the familiar ramp. The tempo seemed awfully fast to me and they seemed to add a little step-kick to the back with bent leg that wasn't familiar. I quickly pulled up on another screen the entrances by Royal Ballet and Paris and, indeed, much slower tempo and no kick-step. So now I wonder if that was something found in the Stepanov notation that we'd never seen before. The variations and ensemble work were familiar with slight differences. E.g., the skarf dance had her holding the scarf by herself. No sling up onto the man's shoulder. And that very fast tempo again. So I wonder if there is a basis for thinking that's from the original. And I did keep wishing for a split screen to compare changes. 

I'm going to have to watch this again tomorrow and encourage everybody to take a look. I'm curious what others think.

Edited March 30 by California

[volcanohunter]

In Ratmansky's production there is something like a pas de cheval in the shades' entrance, and the tempo is much faster than what we are used to seeing. In his production Nikiya does the scarf dance completely on her own, and when she's done with it, the scarf flies up and into the wings. I'm going to guess there was a technical reason why this wasn't done in Bloomington.

[California]

4 hours ago, volcanohunter said:

In Ratmansky's production there is something like a pas de cheval in the shades' entrance, and the tempo is much faster than what we are used to seeing. In his production Nikiya does the scarf dance completely on her own, and when she's done with it, the scarf flies up and into the wings. I'm going to guess there was a technical reason why this wasn't done in Bloomington.

I see that the metronome was invented in 1815, so there could be an historic record of the original tempo. I don't know if it was in use in Russia, but that seems possible.   https://www.wqxr.org/story/beat-goes-history-metronome/

Pas de cheval -- yes! Interesting that it was dropped at some point in later productions. 

[doug]

Hi all,

The music scores in the Sergeyev Collection that date from his time in Riga contain metronome markings for much of the Shades scene, and I followed those pretty closely. And yes, we weren’t able to rig the scarf successfully to fly up into the air halfway through the variation. In the Shades entrance, the dancers perform a cou-de-pied back after the cambre and before stepping forward. It ends up looking like a pas de cheval.