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Vladislav

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  1. Dear Peanut68, thank you for your comment, and I apologize for writing my response almost two weeks after your post! It is interesting that you “love new ideas & interpretations ...”, many ballet (and opera) lovers would apparently have different opinion. Probably the main thing I’ve learned after trying to put together stories for a ballet is that the greatness, deepness, originality etc. of initial ideas mean nothing in the end if they cannot be translated into a concrete stage performance. That is, into solid sequence of events which will be shown on stage, will fit into the music and will (ideally) tell a story without words. After I managed to come up with such a complete new story with the music of Nutcracker I became so arrogant that I started to believe that I have a hidden talent for “writing ballets”. I immediately tried to re-interpret the other ones. In particular “Cinderella” and “Coppelia”. I completely failed! Although I seemed to have super-innovative ideas in the beginning this all was useless. I could never turn them into something which could be performed on stage and would be interesting (at least in theory) to watch. After learning more about ballet in general and “The Nutcracker” in particular I had to realize that the reason I managed to “re-write” its libretto was not because I was so special, but because the music of “The Nutcracker” is so special. This approach simply will not work – at least not so easily – with other ballets. Thank you a lot for wishing me good luck, nevertheless it seems I gave up! Fine arts is not my world, and I’m not ready to take extraordinary efforts and finally fade away like Martin Eden.
  2. Thank you very much @Fonty! By reading some answers in this thread, and by reading an American ballet forum I think I understood the main issue. The majority of people relate this music exclusively to the familiar Christmas fairy tale for children. It will be difficult for them to accept this same music as background for a completely different story. Although "The Nutcracker" ballet as a Christmas event might be mostly American phenomenon, it is different in Europe.
  3. Dear Sam, thank you! You have perfectly summarized in two sentences what I wanted to describe in my long post. I tend to believe more and more now that the composer intentionally coded exactly this kind of story in that music. "The Tchaikovsky code - finally (nut)cracked!"
  4. The version there Maria (or Clara) is an elderly lady brought for a short time back to her youth can be considered as a ‘sad’ one. However, how much ‘sadder’ this version would really be compared to the ‘joyful’ one? One can imaging the following ‘thought experiment’ - Gedankenexperiment. I wake up in the morning and suddenly find out that I’m in my room in the parent’s apartment. I look at myself and realize that I’m 18 years old. I go to the kitchen and meet there my parents, both intact and young, and even our dog is there. For some strange reason this all does not wonder me at all. I go out and see the town how it used to be decades ago, meet my friends and relatives: young, healthy and alive … After a while I do understand with all clarity that this state cannot last for longer, and soon this journey is indeed over. I’m back in my actual reality. What would I feel about such experience? Would it make me happy or sad? Happy in the beginning, but sad in the end one might say. Sad because this reminds me about something which I’ve lost forever. But was it really ‘lost forever’ if I have just experienced this ‘lost forever’ life again? At least for a shot time, perhaps for only a few hours, but I was there! Maybe it was not the very last and only time, maybe I will be brought there again? On the next Christmas!? It was not lost forever - it stays forever as long as I exist! –--------------------------- What have I just written😳? That is what happens when listening to Tchaikovsky ….
  5. I fully agree that an “inverted” Nutcracker cannot be replacement of the “traditional” one. Nevertheless, as far as I understood the ballet of Graeme Murphy was successful (is still running?). There was even an attempt – according to newspaper publications which I found – in 2008 to stage this ballet in Mikhailovsky Theater in Saint-Peterspurg. They were going to have two Nutcrackers in parallel: a “traditional” one (Vajonen), and that of Graeme Murphy. However this project was apparently never completed. In my sketches (the first message of this topic) I made no references neither to the Nutcracker character nor to the Hoffmann’s tale. This was intentional to underscore that this is a completely different story with the same music. Although I realize that from the marketing point of view this is not a good idea.
  6. I personally do not find them out of place. I think that all parts perfectly fit together exactly when one assumes that the music tells a story about elderly person who on Christmas Eve is taken by some magic force back to her past. She feels again all the joy and fun of her youth (the divertissement of the 2nd act is the highlight), and than realizes in all clarity that this is now the last touch and than this will be gone forever (the final pas de deux). I’m wondering more and more now why there are so few attempts of interpretation along this path? Why, with only a few exceptions, all interpretations of this ballet stick more or less to the scheme of the Hoffmann’s tale, but do not follow the music? Even nowdays when it is almost mandatory in theater to re-interpret everything.
  7. I've recently learned that my interpretation of “The Nutcracker” could have even more sense when I myself initially assumed. One important fact in Tchaikovsky’s biography explains a lot about this music. (I have to admit, I didn’t know about that). Namely, passing away of his beloved sister Alexandra shortly after Tchaikovsky begun to work on “The Nutcracker”. See the article in the “Tchaikovsky wikipedia” https://en.tchaikovsky-research.net/pages/The_Nutcracker. That is the most likely explanation why the music at many places sounds much more like reminiscences on something lost forever rather than a coming-of-age story of a young girl. There is also an excellent video essay about this called “The Dark Side of The Nutcracker“ by composer Martin Barnaby https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utOGq2Vtr1M (as a warning: he misspells the name Petipa many times) I am even starting to be surprised that for more than hundred years this piece exists there were so little attempts of the “inverted” interpretation of this music by choreographers and directors. Besides the Graeme Murphy's ballet “The story of Clara” discussed above I have found only one more so far. “The Harlem Nutcracker” by choreographer Donald Byrd, premiered in 1996. It is a very unusual interpretation to say the least. First of all because the music used is a jazz arrangement of the Tchaikovsky’s score based on the jazz version of “The Nutcracker Suite” by Duke Ellington. In this ballet Clara is indeed an elderly lady whose husband passed away recently and she is celebrating her first Christmas without him. On the Christmas Eve she meets him again and they again spent their time together. A video of the full performance can be found here (medium quality) https://vimeo.com/194264426
  8. Thinking over your comment I had to recognize that the view I expressed above must had been very restricted by the situation in one ... middle European country. I have watched "The Hero ..." by myself, I should have remembered it. The Bolshoi's titles you mentioned are all indeed recent, and staged by relatively young authors. I could even extend this list. Miroshnichenko's "Cinderella" was also staged not long ago. A ballet with an interesting concept where the music of Prokofiev is not changed, but the story which is told is completely different, and they fit surprisingly well. ... All right, if so then my ideas still have a chance!
  9. Oh, thank you! And thank you for pointing out on the potential plagiarism issue, I have to admit that I didn't think about it at all. As far as I could observe the ballet world of today it seems that ballets with story line are considered outdated. The modern ballets are all abstract. Therefore I'm sceptical by myself that anyone could be interested in my notes. Which is not a big problem since I don't do it for a living.
  10. Thank you for the reply! So far I have only posted my notes on several dance forums. I simply don't know whom I could contact and if there is anybody who may be interested. The ideas come spontaneously, and I write them down before I forget.
  11. For some reason I can barely explain to myself I wrote one more ballet script. "A trip to the Moon", ballet in 2 acts loosely based on Jules Verne, Herbert G. Wells and the silent film of Georges Méliès "Le Voyage dans la Lune". No certain music is selected, probably Jacques Offenbach. English translation of the synopsis can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kZAnfB2XKUHkIEL4ruf4vyVvOxDvv8qAyj2A19N1Mvk/edit?usp=sharing The full script is available in German https://docs.google.com/document/d/14d1h-dkjXovpsTGc39yyYHX2Xuv8YTUl68icQMt8KyQ/edit?usp=sharing and in Russian https://docs.google.com/document/d/10p1qO8rGNDXhFtVBCkwI5OVgFpSLbQK-1stE8rMN9Zs/edit?usp=sharing
  12. I apologize, I have overlooked it. There is a full length video of the Graeme Murphy's ballet on Ytb!
  13. It’s a pity that there are no long videos of this Australian production on the surface of the Web. Only short trailers. There is, however, an interesting conversation with the choreographer Graeme Murphy. Among other things he says the following. “To me there is more to this than the original scenario the poor Tchaikovski had to rope demanded” ... “The story in Nutcracker has always been a stumbling point, there is so little story, and that was one of my biggest problems when Manor asked me to do this production. I could not quite to come to terms with that story, and committing myself to doing my first full length ballet to something I could not quite believe in”. I find that this 100% meets my opinion too! I often had a feeling that the music of “The Nutcracker” is much bigger than the sugar-toys fairy tail performed on stage.
  14. Dear Sophoife, thank you for the reply and for the link! Unfortunately, I could not find from which year this production is. I have seen many versions of “The Nutcracker”, and I was indeed wondering why nobody had come up with an idea to revert the story of the young girl dreaming about adult life. At the same time, I see a number of things in their libretto which I intentionally tried to avoid. Close connection of the plot with a certain historic period may lead to unnecessary politization and distract from the essence of the story. Also, the main character is poor, lonely, and dies in the end - ‘formal overdramatization’. To be honest, for me this is a cheap trick to make the audience cry. On the opposite, I decided that the formal story must be as ordinary and banal as possible, but the audience will cry anyway. The connection to the original Hoffmann’s tail with the Nutcracker doll and mice also seems to be not absolutely necessary. (To avoid misunderstanding: what I wrote above must not be understood as criticism of this particular production!!! Which I haven’t seen and cannot evaluate!)
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