The XVI International Ballet Festival will run at the Mariinsky Theatre from 31 March to 10 April 2016.
In line with tradition, the festival will open with a premiere – Reinhold Glière’s The Bronze Horseman is making a return to the Mariinsky Theatre. Staged in 1949 by Rostislav Zakharov, this ballet was deeply loved by both audiences and performers. The new stage version of this famous production, created taking into account the technical possibilities of the Mariinsky-II, will form a dialogue between the generations: Zakharov’s choreography will be taught to the dancers by participants of the 1980 revival of The Bronze Horseman, while new elements of the production will be staged by choreographer Yuri Smekalov.
The festival’s guest company is the ballet company of the Perm Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theatre. In St Petersburg, the visitors from Perm will present their recent premieres: productions by the British classical choreographers Frederick Ashton (Les Patineurs) and Kenneth MacMillan (Winter Dreams) as well as the one-act ballet Snow Was Falling created especially for the Perm company by Douglas Lee.
During the festival there will also be an evening with Mariinsky Theatre prima ballerina Diana Vishneva, the programme to include Carolyn Carlson’s ballet Woman in a Room and the St Petersburg premiere of Hans van Manen’s Live. In this production, created in 1979 and which recently entered the dancer’s repertoire, the cameraman follows every step of the protagonist, the camera focussing on every detail, studying her face and the way she moves. The apparently minimalistic piece which unfolds in the sets of a ballet studio is an emotional story that holds the audience in suspense.
For the fourth time the Mariinsky ballet festival will be holding the Creative Workshop of Young Choreographers at which young ballet-masters will present their new works. With every passing year the number of participants in the workshop increases: at the XVI festival, in addition to already-known participants, there will be productions by soloists of the Opéra de Paris and the Bolshoi Theatre.
The festival playbill also features repertoire productions of the Mariinsky Theatre – guests from the Opéra de Paris will be performing lead roles together with St Petersburg dancers.
The festival will conclude with a gala concert featuring, in addition to the traditional divertissement, a new work by Director of the ballet company of the Opéra de Paris Benjamin Millepied – Appassionata to music by Beethoven, a co-production by the Opéra de Paris and the Mariinsky Theatre. The premiere of this production took place in February 2016 in Paris and was performed by French dancers, and at the Mariinsky festival it will be danced by Étoiles of the Opéra de Paris Amandine Albisson and Hervé Moreau together with Mariinsky Theatre dancers. In May a combined cast of Russian and French dancers will again present Appassionata at the Opéra Garnier in Paris.
| user_name | | Exit |
