On 28 December at 13.00 the Mariinsky II will be hosting the one hundredth performance of Konyok-Gorbunok (The Little Humpbacked Horse). This ballet combines many successful ingredients: a fairy-tale plot (engaging for children), its ironic interpretation (interesting for adults), the extravagant and stylish designs by Maxim Isaev, the talented and inventive choreography of Alexei Ratmansky and the emotional music of Rodion Shchedrin.
The score of the ballet Konyok-Gorbunok was composed by Shchedrin when he was a young man, still a student at the Moscow Conservatory. With his humour, wit, colourfulness and joie de vivre it has inspired many musicians and choreographers, yet each of them has found something for him or herself in it. Alexander Radunsky, who created the first choreographic version of Shchedrin's Konyok at the Bolshoi Theatre (1960), heard a traditional ballet fairy-tale in it. In the same piece, Igor Belsky, who staged his own version of Konyok at the Maly Opera Theatre in 1963, heard sharp satire. In 1981 at the Kirov Theatre, Dmitry Bryantsev staged a version of his own, combining fair-like decorativeness with entirely human portraits of the protagonists.
Ratmansky's ballet is a child of the early 21st century. In this dynamic, merry and ironic production there is also room for dance, both classical and character, and mime scenes, serious virtuoso skill and reckless humour. The dances crafted by the choreographer are interesting to perform, each role opening up a broad spectrum for creativity: on the one hand, for acting embodiment and improvisation and, on the other, to assert oneself in a technically complex dance text. If, in the role of the odd and grotesquely presented duffer of a King, the playful element is richer than the dance and expression of the "popular print" images of the Father and Ivan's Brothers and is simple in terms of plastique, then Ivan the Fool, Ivan the Virgin, appears in some scenes as childishly capricious and in others as virginously tender, and the nimble and adroit Horse reveals his nature namely through the dance.
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