Le Jeune homme et la mort
 Études 

Premiere: 15 January 1948, Royal Danish Ballet, Royal Theatre, Copenhagen
Premiere at the Mariinsky Theatre: 18 April 2003
Premiere of the revival: 27 February 2010

Running time 45 minutes

One key text of the ballet repertoire, whenever, wherever. The idea, as they say, was picked up off the floor. For ballet dancers all over the globe, every morning begins in the same way: the rehearsal room, the mirror, the barre along the walls, polished by the touch of many hands. In these same settings, every morning, all over the globe, thousands of ballet dancers have been doing one and the same thing in the same sequence for several hundred years now: holding onto the barre, plie, battements tendus, rond de jambes: Done. Into the centre. Repeat. Leaps. These are daily exercises to keep the legs flexible. The most prosaic, ordinary thing, like brushing one´s teeth or tying one´s shoelaces. In this everyday professional occurrence, the choreographer Harald Lander recognised the beginnings of pure theatre gold: a ballet almost complete and its anonymous, collective creator, as the sequence and contour of the movements of the exercises have been fine-tuned over centuries. The ballet exercise in Études has everything: a lead character, subject, composition, content, occasion, justification for action, and lastly the action itself. The dancers pronounce the letters of the ballet “alphabet of movement”, arrange the letters into syllables, syllables into words, words into phrases, phrases into lines of poetry:
When he transferred the exercise to the stage, Lander resolutely, decisively and fundamentally rejected any claims to his own signature and authorship at all. The gesture, natural for the post-modernist 1990s, was made, however, in 1948. But the refusenik choreographer merely achieved the reverse: for a long time, his name and his production were pronounced in one breath throughout the ballet world as “Lander´s Etudes”.
Yulia Yakovleva