Le Boeuf sur le toit

Premiere of Darius Milhaud's ballet staged by Jean Cocteau – 21 February 1920, Théâtre des Champs Élysées, Paris
Premiere with choreography by Vladimir Varnava – 29 December 2020, Mariinsky Theatre

Running time: 20 minutes

Age category: 6+

Credits

Music by Darius Milhaud
Choreography by Vladimir Varnava
Costume Designer: Galya Solodovnikova
Lighting Designer: Igor Fomin

SYNOPSIS

The characters of this infernal divertissement are a trio of mariachi musicians, a female character reminiscent of a certain famous Mexican artist, the legendary Latin American folklore figure of El Diablo, who also appears as "the Christmas Demon" and the principal instigator of carnival, and, of course, Madame Death (La Muerte), who, apropos, remains on the peripheries of the general merriment. To amuse themselves, the protagonists dance on red-hot boards to the melodies of the Argentinian tango, the Brazilian maxixe and samba and the Portuguese fado, combining these with elements of flirtation and improvisation. In the general madness there is no room for loneliness. The dances of the dead force the Earth to rotate on its axis, making night interchangeable with day. This feasting during an outbreak of plague engenders the idea of how all of life is an amazing dance, the charms of which even Madame Death herself is unable to resist. Vladimir Varnava

In this ballet by Vladimir Varnava, the audience may expect to see dances of death on the stage. The music which provided the basis for the ballet was written by Darius Milhaud while under impressions from his travels in Brazil, and the idea to stage the production came to Vladimir Varnava in Mexico, where he was stunned by the local people's attitude to death – that being much brighter and happier than in our own Christian tradition. The choreographer envisaged depicting a carnival in Hell in his ballet, where fiends and people dance, and even unsmiling Death itself joins in, unable to resist the universal merriment. Regardless of the extravagant nature of the plot, the choreographer says that he does not plan to take members of the audience out of their comfort zone with this production: his aim is to discover an interesting synthesis of music and dance. "In Milhaud's work there is a surprising combination of the complex and the comprehensible, of classical and folk music," Varnava says. "I discovered this when I was working on the ballet Clay, which I staged to the music of Milhaud's La Création du monde which deals with the beginnings of life. In Le Bœuf sur le toit the reverse is true – here I am depicting what happens after life ends. They are two independent ballets, but for me they are to be seen as a single whole."