I think we chose wisely as LA BAYADÉRE is one of the ballets most associated with the Mariinsky company. The piece was the collaboration of the writer Sergei Khudekov and the father of classical ballet as we know it, choreographer Marius Petipa to a score by Ludwig Minkus in 1877.
It's a load of old hokum of course, but Petipa's choreography is still a marvel. Saying that however, this production is based on a 1941 Kirov revival which was overhauled by Vladimir Ponomarev and Vakhtang Chabukiani. Also credited is the choreographer Nikolai Zubkovsky who created "The Dance of The Golden Idol" for a 1948 Kirov revival. Oh and Konstantin Sergeyev gets a shout-out too for supplying the notations for Petipa's final production in 1905 which he managed to spirit out of Russia after the revolution thus allowing the Imperial Ballet's to survive for the ballet companies in the West.
The plot is a headspinner - in India, the temple dancer Nikiya loves the warrior Solor but he is married off - with apparently no say in the matter - to a powerful Rajah's daughter Gamzatti. The High Brahmin who also has designs on the dancer gets her agreement to dance at Gamzatti's wedding not knowing who she is marrying. The High Brahmin further stirs it by telling the Rajah that Solor was betrothed to Nikiya - but the Rajah decides to kill her rather than the erring warrior. Men eh?
Gamzatti has Nikiya brought to the palace and tells her to leave Solor but it all gets a bit heated and after Nikiya threatens Gamzatti with a knife, the Rajah's daughter too wants the girl dead. She still dances at the event but doesn't realize that the basket of flowers presented to her is not from Solor but from nasty Gamzatti, it contains a poisonous snake who bites Nikiya and she dies.
Solor is distressed - as he bloody should be - and drifts off in an opium haze to the Kingdom of The Shades where ghostly virgins walk the earth and there he finds Nikiya and they are reconciled. The original featured a fourth act which involves the wedding of Solor and Gamzatti in the temple but her murder of a temple dancer has angered the gods who destroy the temple killing all within, leaving Solor to be reunited with Nikiya in the heavens, but this was dropped in a 1920 post-revolutionary revival and has stayed in the Russian canon like this ever since.
Amazingly the West had to wait until 1961 to see the first full-length LA BAYADÉRE in Argentina but two year's later the then-Kirov Ballet danced the Kingdom of The Shades sequence in Paris which dazzled the ballet world and in 1963, Sir Frederick Ashton asked Rudolph Nureyev to stage the same sequence at Covent Garden for him and Margot Fonteyn, again to huge success. In 1974 Natalia Makarova staged LA BAYADÉRE in America for the first time and she retained the four-act version, indeed the last production at Covent Garden was Makarova's production in 2013. In 1992 Nureyev mounted a production for the Palais Garnier in Paris as he was succumbing to AIDS and after a rapturous opening he died only three months later.
It was certainly spectacular - the production included a wheel-on large elephant and a rather shabby tiger who was seen one production too many - but as with last year's visit from the Bolshoi, I found the actual characterizations fairly bloodless and austere. It made me wonder what the dancers of the Royal Ballet could do with the grand passions of the main characters, they always bring such brio to their performances.
Viktoria Tereshkina was pretty as the Bayadére, Kimin Kim was a very bouncy and spinning Solor and the Golden Idol was flashingly danced by Vasily Tkachenko. So in summation, I am glad to have seen this famous company dancing this famous production, but I think I will give Russian companies the go-by next time. The Kingdom of The Shades *was* truly gorgeous though...
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