Maria: Maria Shirinkina
Vaslav: Nikita Korneyev
Ghirei: Roman Belyakov
Zarema: Yekaterina Chebykina
Nurali: Pavel Ostapenko
Alla Sizova was one of the dancers who established the legend of Leningrad ballet in the 1960s and 1970s, whose appearances the public was agog to attend and whose performances are remembered to this day. Her dance was recorded on film. Even video recordings convey the magnetic qualities of its naturalism. And Sizova’s tremendous and airy leap still amazes today, decades later, when ballet technique, it would seem, has moved forwards.
Alla Sizova joined the Kirov Ballet in 1958, although she had made her debut on the illustrious stage at an earlier date. Appearing as the Queen of the Dryads in Don Quixote while still a student at Leningrad’s Vaganova School of Dance, she made a name for herself with her phenomenal leap: the press spoke of her first appearance in this demanding role as a guaranteed pass into “grand ballet”. At the theatre, the artistic career of Alla Sizova – richly blessed with natural talent and beautifully taught by the coach Natalia Kamkova – quickly took flight. Over the course of three seasons she rehearsed fourteen roles: Myrtha in Giselle, Princess Florine and the Tenderness Fairy in The Sleeping Beauty, Chopiniana. But the culmination of those first years came with the role of Princess Aurora in the ballet The Sleeping Beauty. The embodiment of carefree youth, in this incredibly complex role from the classical repertoire Sizova bewitched audiences in many countries: for her performance as Aurora, the Académie de Danse de Paris awarded her the Prix Anna Pavlova. The ballerina’s technical perfection, refinement and ease as well as her ability to take pleasure from every movement, thus infecting the audience with a certain joie de vivre, made Sizova one of the leaders of the ballet generation of the 1960s and 1970s.
Captivating with its sincerity and intimacy, Alla Sizova’s dance along with her soaring leap of rare beauty revealed new shades in familiar roles – Giselle, Cinderella, Juliet, Maria in The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, Parasha in The Bronze Horseman, Katerina in The Stone Flower, Masha in The Nutcracker and Kitri in Don Quixote. Through her unfeigned frankness and confiding intonation, Sizova made audiences believe in her heroines, whether they were incorporeal sylphs, fairy-tale princesses or village maidens. The individuality of this dancer of lyrical stage types also adorned many contemporary productions of those years: Alla Sizova embodied the image of Ophelia in dance in Konstantin Sergeyev’s Hamlet, and she took part in the creation of Igor Belsky’s Leningrad Symphony, making the tragic theme resound with penetrating dramatism. Religiously honouring the academic qualities of the Leningrad school, she never limited her dance to the mere observance of accepted rules, filling each and every movement with a living and touching emotion. Her musicality and spirituality, inspiration in dance were the key to audiences love. And the light which Alla Sizova radiated on the stage will forever remain in the hearts of her colleagues.
Olga Makarova
Premiere: 28 September 1934, The State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet (Mariinsky)
Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes
The performance has two intervals
The "star hour" of the drama ballet was heralded by the appearance in 1934 at the Leningrad Theatre, then not yet known as the Kirov, of the ballet The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. In it the desire to combine choreography with the themes of high literature and the defence of new Soviet art for the sake of realisticity crystalised the new direction of ballet's development.
The Fountain of Bakhchisarai emerged in an atmosphere of creative discussions of the progressive cultural elite of Leningrad: Professor Boris Asafiev of the conservatoire, an authoratitave composer and music historian, stage director Sergei Radlov who defined the theatre's artistic policy at the time, conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky, designer Valentina Khodasevich, librettist Niklai Volkov and the critic Ivan Sollertinsky. The twenty-seven-year-old choreographer Rostislav Zakharov found himself at the epicentre of artistic and theatre life. He, as a debutant in grand ballet and as a graduate of the stage-directing faculty of the Leningrad Institute of Stage Arts who had recommended himself with his productions of dances in operas and plastique in productions at Radlov's Youth Theatre, was invited to stage the choreography of the new ballet.
Inspired by the recently-published Letters about Dance by Noverre with an introductory article by Sollertinsky about the dramatic effect of dance, in his new ballet the young choreographer introduced well-learned lessons from stage drama to the ballet stage. The dance at times remained on the periphery of the choreographer's attention, the ballet was born not from the dance but from the plot, the cleverly enacted mise-en-scènes. In reaction to the stage director's preferences there was also the inclusion of the acting cast. The expressiveness of Galina Ulanova and Konstantin Sergeyev, who were allocated the lead roles, was to prove an essential element of the production's success. The once-and-forever chosen artistic path of The Fountain of Bakhchisarai and the production of ballet plays brought great acclaim to Zakharov. The literary centrism was to become the "main song" of Zakharov and the mainstream of Soviet ballet for the next twenty years. The poetic nature of ballet, oriented exclusively towards truly the emotional (real or unreal) were interminged with everyday prosaic elements. What remains unsaid in Pushkin's poetry demanded logical explanations, and in The Fountain of Bakhchisarai a new character appeared - Vaslav, Maria's beloved, was included in the plot in order to underscore the difference between the world in which the Polish princess Maria had a happy life and the world of her Tatar captivity. Zakharov taught his dancers to work as actors on their roles, to prepare them for that previously unknown "table-chat" with the director to deal with the characters and the conflicts. And it is not by chance that of performers of the era of drama ballet it was said that "the ballerina is an actress and the danseur an actor." Embodying on the stage the characters of Pushkin's heroes and thus laying the foundations of the traditions of acting expressiveness in Soviet ballet became the mission of the generation of the 1930s-1940s. And Zakharov and his comrades-in-arms who reigned on the Soviet stage throughout the period of so-called drama ballet taught the audiences to ask the question "What are they dancing about". Wishing to be understood, the choreographer forced audiences to think and, at times, thus to forget the eloquence of the dance unburdened by a lexical word-for-word through dance. Olga Makarova
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