The first ballet premiere of the season at the Mariinsky Theatre will be Symphony in Three Movements set to music by Stravinsky. Choreographer Radu Poklitaru is working on the production.
– Radu, can you tell us who invited you to stage this production?
– The story had nothing theatrical about it. Anna Matison decided to make a ballet film. And what I’m now staging at the Mariinsky Theatre is part of that film project. I was offered the post of choreographer to stage the dances in the film to which I responded only if it would be a repertoire performance at the Mariinsky Theatre. The musical basis of the ballet is Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. I’ve met Valery Gergiev several times and he said that he loves this music and it is a great pleasure to conduct it. At the theatre, where everything is planned in advance, it was only in summer that we decided we’d do it.
– Was using the Symphony in Three Movements Matison’s idea?
– Yes. And it was a great idea.
– Anna Matison will direct the film, but has her direction influenced your own work?
– From the very start we were in close artistic collaboration. Anna is the production designer – she does the sets as well as the costumes. And when I came up with the basic plan of the libretto Anna was the person with whom I discussed every detail of the emergent production. With regard to the choreography I acted independently, albeit because Anna was making her film at the time and for purely physical reasons could not attend rehearsals.
– You once said that the delight of commissions lies in overcoming problems. What problems have you had with this production?
– If I’d been offered the choice of a production at the Mariinsky Theatre it definitely would not have been Symphony in Three Movements. I’d heard it once in my life when I was young and was listening to all of Igor Stravinsky’s music. But here I was restricted – it had to be this piece, and that’s wonderful; I love it when there’s a precise commission. At my own Kyiv Modern Ballet Theatre there is always a sense of anguish when selecting anything. For example, just now we’re doing a remake of a grand classical ballet (I won’t say which one yet, I don’t want to bring bad luck); to come to that kind of decision went through quite a bit of trouble.
– Your career as a choreographer began with Stravinsky’s music – your graduation work was Le Baiser de la fée. Over the past sixteen years has your attitude to Stravinsky’s music changed?
– Of course, and I have changed too. I can’t say what exactly has changed, but of course a production by Radu at the age of twenty-eight and one by Radu at the age of forty-three will be different. I never really look at my old ballets at all.
– What about Women in D Minor? (This was first staged by Radu Poklitaru in 2001, and in 2014 he restaged it with the same title to the same music by Bach.)
– It’s a completely new production. The music is the same, the concept is the same, but the movements are all new. It was the same for me with Boléro that was staged in 2003 in Chișinău, and in 2007 I worked on a premiere for the Kyiv Modern Ballet. My mum took ages to rend me a disc (I don’t keep my own video recordings) and by that time I had staged a new Boléro. When, at last, she sent the recording I’d already staged the new work, and I inserted the disc into my computer and said “I’m so glad, that was a terrible production!”
– When you turn to music that has already been used to create famous ballets the “ghosts” of the first interpreters in dance must appear...
– I keep them out of the ballet class.
– You don’t enter a dialogue with Balanchine?
– No. I have to admit I’ve never seen Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements. It sounds like blasphemy, but Balanchine’s choreography, despite its perfection and purity, polyphonic quality and musicality, always leaves me cold as a spectator. I can’t say I’m a great fan of Balanchine. I am for theatre where we feel things.
– Several times you’ve said that you consider yourself “a narrator of stories in dance”. Does that mean that there will be a plot in Symphony in Three Movements?
– Yes, there’s a plot. To start with there was a long synopsis, but as work progressed a great deal changed. From a philosophy course that I took at the Conservatoire I obtained a good basis in the dialectics of Hegel about the incompatibility of the idealistic and reality. The ideal production that is born in your mind is always different from the actual product that you get with living performers. Much depends on you today, the performers, the atmosphere in the auditorium, it often takes you someplace you never even expected to go.
– Does the ballet need a synopsis?
In any programme I always try to minimise the text. I really love Béjart’s words “A ballet synopsis inserted into a programme is a degrading assistant on paper.” And so I prefer very laconic texts in the programme that only provide the dotted lines.
– Symphony in Three Movements was composed by Stravinsky in 1945. Although the composer said that it was not a programmatic piece we know of his revelations that each episode is linked with a certain impression of war. For example, the third movement was a response to documentary evidence of the war years with lines of soldiers on the march. In your Symphony will there be any allusions to war?
– Valery Gergiev provided me with just such a text at our first meeting. Prior to that I had no intention of including any military march, but that was a condition of the commission – and it’s brilliant! As a result there are allusions to war in the ballet.
– Did you select the dancers yourself?
– Yes, I came to the casting process and I saw most of the company. Because the project appeared rather suddenly it has hard to combine the Mariinsky’s touring schedule with production work. And so the number of people I could choose from wasn’t so very great, but I’m very pleased at how the company works. The corps de ballet is stunning – creative and responsive and their eyes burn with passion.
– Do you create in ballet class?
– Always in class. Before that you can listen to the music a bit. You mentioned Le Baiser de la fée, my graduation work, and I’ll say how I staged that ballet. At the time I was really worried as I was a dancer with the same company and I was having to stage a work for these people, some of whom were much older than me and had taught me the necessary discipline when I arrived as a nineteen-year-old boy, they helped me... With some I was not on familiar terms. But here you had to come into the class and say “Well, come on, guys, get up and work!” I prepared myself for it. I had a recording of Le Baiser de la fée (back then they were still actual records) and the score, and I wrote down a huge crowd scene in squares – the boys with crosses and the girls with circles, all of them numbered and marked, who moves where over however many bars of music. My knees shaking, I entered the Bolshoi Theatre of the Republic of Belarus and said “Good morning, kind colleagues!” Everyone thought “We’ve got a real sniveller here.” Then I said “Be so kind – you’re No 1, you’re No 2.” Everyone looked at the paper where the movements had been beautifully drawn out. I put everyone in their positions, asked for the music, put the paper to one side and began to choreograph. When the rehearsal was finished the piece was ready to go. The dancers left the class and I took the piece of paper and realised that apart from the first square nothing was left. I had staged something totally different, not at all what I had planned earlier. I understood that it is useless to prepare at home but I went about with this paper until the production period ended. The most important thing was that everyone saw that I was coming prepared, even though the paper for every dance was one and the same piece of paper. The ideal and the realistic are incompatible. For example, today we did the finale and before the rehearsal my assistant and I thought about how we could get the men to form a fist. We liked the idea so much, but we came to class and realised that a fist wouldn’t work. We had to do something else. Ballet is an art of trial and error.
– Speaking of the Bolshoi Theatre, you have said that over the eleven years between your productions there the dancers have lost their fear of contemporary dance. Do the Mariinsky Theatre’s dancers have this fear?
– They complain that everything is uncomfortable for them, the movements unusual and strange; sometimes they slip, sometimes they fall... But I think that when they see the end result it will inspire them. We are progressing at record pace – in ten days we have staged a ballet from scratch! It’s not a ballet being restaged, the choreography is new from the first to the last movement. Work wouldn’t have gone so fast without my assistant, Sergei Kon. Because of health issues he had to leave the Kyiv Modern Ballet Theatre where he had been a soloist. Sergei is also a wonderful choreographer and when I offered him the opportunity to come to the Mariinsky Theatre as an assistant he accepted with great enthusiasm. He also generates ideas and it’s very easy to work with him.
Speaking with Olga Makarova
The full text of the interview (in Russian) is available in the December issue of the newspaper The Mariinsky Theatre.
| user_name | | Exit |
