A debut in La Sylphide

Scene from the ballet La Sylphide

The ballet La Sylphide is the oldest classical ballet in the world and the first work of romanticism in ballet. In 1832 La Sylphide was staged by the choreographer Filippo Taglioni for his daughter Marie. She had dance qualities that were very unusual for the time – long arms and legs in addition to being thin... Moreover, she had slightly rounded shoulders. In order to correct these faults, Filippo Taglioni created special slippers for his daughter which had the tips tucked in to allow her to stand on her toes which created a sense of weightlessness and soaring in the air.
As well as pointe shoes Marie Taglioni also introduced another innovation in ballet – a special dress with a delicate skirt that was later to become a symbol of “white” ballet. This costume, created for the ballerina by the designer Eugène Lami in 1839, is today known as a “chopinka.” Taglioni’s La Sylphde laid the foundations for the era of romanticism in ballet. In 1836 August Bournonville created his own version of the ballet to music by Herman von Løvenskiold, which to this day remains in the repertoires of the world’s great classical theatres.
Ballet critic and choreography historian Vera Krasovskaya noted that “Dance which later came to be known as ‘classical’ conveyed the most complex movements of the soul – a soul made visible, which took on a material appearance and which was a kind of dialect of beings from a fantastical world, a kind of poetic language in which the Sylph and others like her expressed their thoughts and experiences, from dazzling joy to bitter sadness. And it was to become particularly expressive in the final moments of the dramatic plot: by depicting motion, motion itself appeared.”

On 19 January 1892 at the Mariinsky Theatre Marius Petipa staged his ballet La Sylphide after the choreography of Filippo Taglioni (with additional music by Riccardo Drigo). The lead roles were performed by Varvara Nikitina and Pavel Gerdt. La Sylphide was premiered on 1 December 1981 at the Kirov Theatre with choreography by August Bournonville (the version staged to this day). The premiere with Galina Mezentseva and Yevgeny Neff was a tremendous success.

On 18 November Vadim Belyaev will be making his debut as Gurn in the ballet La Sylphide.