Debuts in Shurale

Scene from the ballet Shurale

Leonid Yakobson’s Shurale is a colourful ballet fairytale. Its music, rich in ethnic flavours, was composed by the Tatar composer Farid Yarullin, the libretto being inspired by a Tatar legend. Retaining the broad plot, the choreographer resolved to depict all of the conflicts in this ballet through dance. Yakobson used diverse expressive means to characterise different worlds: the world of the wood goblin Shurale and his retinue in the woodland kingdom of monsters is depicted through the grotesque, and in the fantastical world of the bird-maidens the heroines’ expressions are structured around classical dance while in the folk scenes the main expressive means are the character dances.

As Shurale, Trofim Malanov will have to demonstrate “non-classical” expressiveness in his plastique in order to convince the audience of his character’s supreme power and cunning. The characters of Shurale, the Evil Spirit and the Fiery Witch require a certain temperament of the performers, as their dances represent an orgy of evil. As the bird-maiden Syuimbike Anastasia Matvienko will have to be convincing in both the ethereal classical dance in the scenes where her character appears as a bird and in the character dances to convey the specific style of the folk scenes.