Bolshoi Ballet : Ratmansky new Giselle

[annamk]

This evening is the premiere of Ratmansky's new Giselle for the Bolshoi. This news video is in Russian so even though I can't understand it's still interesting to see the costumes and staging. 

 

https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=ru&sp=nmt4&u=https://tvrain.ru/teleshow/vechernee_shou/meldonij_dlja_balerin-497766/&xid=25657,15700023,15700186,15700190,15700256,15700259,15700262,15700265,15700271,15700283&usg=ALkJrhij0y84wnEnM-Z0c4iIy9RMP_FSFg

 

 

[LinMM]

I couldn't get this to  work very well ....kept loading and re loading ....but eventually saw the video but then no sound!! Anyway the costumes looked pretty traditional and the bits of choreography I saw also. 

I'm always interested in any new Ratmansky so will be interested to see how it's generally received at the Bolshoi.

[stucha]

Two horses! Impressive.  😉

Edited November 23, 2019 by stucha

[Sim]

Fabulous review of this production from the NY Times in today’s links. I wish I could see it. 
 

Someone should have told the editor that the Bolshoi is in Moscow, not St Petersburg....🤦🏻‍♀️

[Mary]

Is it not live screening in January?

Or am I confused...

[Shade]

Yes I believe it is planned to be screened 

[CHazell2]

Absolutely can't wait to see this. By the sounds of it, it will be one of the historical informed productions ever.

[stucha]

The date of the screening is 26 January 2020.  And hopefully available on the Bolshoi video channel for 24 hours after the broadcast.

[LinMM]

I got the impression from the article....perhaps wrongly .... that  it was going to be screened in Canada and USA 

Edited November 24, 2019 by LinMM

[LinMM]

Can anyone remember when Michaela de Prince guested as Myrthe in Giselle in London ....was it with ENB ...I don't think it was ...but can't think which Company it was. 

Anhway I seem to remember that in that performance a fugue was used in the second Act that isn't usually seen .....but was used originally in the ballet....I don't know whether this is the same fugue that Ratmansky is using. 

[Lizbie1]

 

5 minutes ago, LinMM said:

Can anyone remember when Michaela de Prince guested as Myrthe in Giselle in London ....was it with ENB ...I don't think it was ...but can't think which Company it was. 

 

It was indeed with ENB in January 2017.

[CHazell2]

 

19 minutes ago, LinMM said:

Can anyone remember when Michaela de Prince guested as Myrthe in Giselle in London ....was it with ENB ...I don't think it was ...but can't think which Company it was. 

Anhway I seem to remember that in that performance a fugue was used in the second Act that isn't usually seen .....but was used originally in the ballet....I don't know whether this is the same fugue that Ratmansky is using. 

Yes, it was the ENB in the Mary Skeaping production, which in my opinion is one of the best Giselle productions out there and Skeaping was herself, a musicologist who studied the original Adam score in the Paris Opera House's archives and added the Fugue back in because she said, it showed the conflict between good and evil.

 

It does sound like Ratmansky is using the same fugue - be interesting to see how he choreographs it. I also hope that the mime is kept intact as Berthe's mime, in which she tells the legend of the Wilis is very atmospheric.

Edited November 24, 2019 by CHazell2

[Shade]

Yes I saw that Giselle- it was terrific 

[LinMM]

It was ....I liked the fugue piece and Michaela was wonderful as  Myrthe. 

 

[Sim]

Agree.  One of the best productions of Giselle I have seen.  I am still in awe of BRB’s, too!  

[stucha]

23 hours ago, LinMM said:

I got the impression from the article....perhaps wrongly .... that  it was going to be screened in Canada and USA 

 

Yes USA and Canada as well as the rest of the world.  It is part of the Bolshoi in cinema live screenings series, just as Raymonda recently.

[Beryl H]

Just read the very good review on DanceTabs, it sounds wonderful, the peasant pdd back as a pdd, the fugue movement is in the second act, and, something I have always wanted to see, the original ending where the royal party come looking for Albrecht and Giselle gestures him to return to life, hopefully the last piece of music has been restored to fit it.

[CHazell2]

Sounds Fantastic

[alison]

2 hours ago, Beryl H said:

it sounds wonderful, the peasant pdd back as a pdd,

 

 

That's something I'm personally not too keen on   It's such a major pdd that I think (at least in the versions I've seen over the years) it detracts from Giselle and Albrecht too much - in the same way that we were just discussing that Birbanto, Lankendem et al can overwhelm Conrad on occasion in Le Corsaire.

[Irmgard]

As well as the news footage, someone has posted some secretly filmed footage from the balcony on Belyakov's Facebook page which someone alerted me to.  Sadly, in the bits I have seen, the mother's mime is not only badly done but is quite bizarre and is nothing like the one Karsavina learned from Petipa which she passed on to Mary Skeaping (and is now done in the Royal Ballet production, as it was in Ashton's and Karsavina's staging in the 1960s).   I shall wait to see the whole thing before commenting on the choreography but it will be interesting to see if Ratmansky has got rid of all the lifts in the Act II pas de deux which were added by the Bolshoi in the production they brought to England in 1956.  Many thanks for all the kind comments about the Skeaping production, of which I am the guardian for the Skeaping family.  With regard to the peasant pas de deux, Skeaping keeps this in her production (but with each having one solo rather than the two in the original Perrot/Coralli version) but, because it was an interpolation, she places it much earlier so that, as Alison remarks, it does not detract from Giselle and Albrecht (its position in the original was a purely 'political' move) who then have the whole of the Pas de Vendanges pas de deux before the denouement.  This was cut drastically at some point in Russia so will not feature in the Stepanov notation.  I did see that some of the music is retained in Ratmansky's production but since the person filming was only interested in Belyakov I have no idea at the moment how much of it comes before the bit of solo I saw.  Bathilde and her father arrived on "white steeds" in the original 1841 ballet because there was room on the old Paris Opera stage for it, as there is on the Bolshoi stage.  It will be interesting to see the original ending to the ballet.  Skeaping uses the original music in the original orchestration but the one thing she thought would be difficult for today's audiences to accept was the original staging in which Giselle blesses the union of Albrecht and Bathilde as she disappears back into the earth! It will be interesting to see how this works out in this production!

[LinMM]

I think it would be very difficult to add to the pathos of today's ending with the original one somehow but would have to see how exactly staged etc but the ending as it is now seems perfect to me as Giselle disappears forever and Albrecht is left alone on stage to contemplate what has happened! 

Ive had several videos and piccies dropping into my Facebook page today of this new Giselle and the costumes look lovely. 

 

[CHazell2]

1 hour ago, Irmgard said:

 Sadly, in the bits I have seen, the mother's mime is not only badly done but is quite bizarre and is nothing like the one Karsavina learned from Petipa which she passed on to Mary Skeaping (and is now done in the Royal Ballet production, as it was in Ashton's and Karsavina's staging in the 1960s).   I shall wait to see the whole thing before commenting on the choreography 

Hi Irmgard

 

When you say that Berthe's mime is bizarre - what precisely do you mean? 

 

Did the mime not come across particularly well or did they use different gestures?

 

 

[bridiem]

1 hour ago, LinMM said:

I think it would be very difficult to add to the pathos of today's ending with the original one somehow but would have to see how exactly staged etc but the ending as it is now seems perfect to me as Giselle disappears forever and Albrecht is left alone on stage to contemplate what has happened! 

 

She doesn't disappear in the BRB production, and I absolutely love that ending. This one promises to be even more radical (literally). For me, the concept is powerful (Giselle's forgiveness and love so complete that she wishes only for Albrecht's future happiness). But as you say it depends how it's staged - will be very interesting to see if/how it works.

[LinMM]

How exactly does the BRB one end then?

[Irmgard]

34 minutes ago, CHazell2 said:

Hi Irmgard

 

When you say that Berthe's mime is bizarre - what precisely do you mean? 

 

Did the mime not come across particularly well or did they use different gestures?

 

 

It all looked a bit manic, there were some very strange gestures and it certainly did not clearly tell the legend of the Wilis as taught by Karsavina to Mary Skeaping, plus the music for it was drastically cut.

[bridiem]

8 minutes ago, LinMM said:

How exactly does the BRB one end then?

 

 You see Giselle rising above Albrecht, lovingly watching over him as he weeps at her grave.

[LinMM]

Aah nice ....implying being his guardian spirt may continue ( not for one night only as it were) 

[CHazell2]

13 minutes ago, Irmgard said:

It all looked a bit manic, there were some very strange gestures and it certainly did not clearly tell the legend of the Wilis as taught by Karsavina to Mary Skeaping, plus the music for it was drastically cut.

Gosh, wonder why - Usually Alexei Ratmansky is good at that sort of thing. Maybe it was the choice of the dancer in that particular performance?

[maryrosesatonapin]

I thought the mime was very clear.

 

[alison]

This is getting to be rather more of a performance discussion, so I've moved it over.

[FLOSS]

The reason why the mime is unfamiliar is that it is not the mime which Karsavina learned and later taught to others . Her mime for Giselle's mother was no doubt what was seen in theatrical performance at the time she danced Giselle but it is essentially an edited version of the mime originally created for the ballet. I have no idea whether Petipa or an earlier ballet master at the Mariinsky revised and shortened the mime  passages nor why the mime  was adapted . A number of possibilities present themselves ranging from a shift in audience tastes which had made them more interested in the dance elements of the ballet than the mime passages; a ballet master wanting to accommodate another set of dances and finally the company accommodating the loss of a character dancer who had been particularly effective in delivering lengthy passages of mime. It is unlikely that we shall ever discover the real reason for the change. It is quite simple for us as Ratmansky's production is using an earlier fuller version of the mime passages just as Pacific North West Ballet's did in its 2014 production. As far as speed and clarity are concerned I imagine that Ratmansky is taking Adam's markings seriously and that he is trying to get his dancers to transition from other action into mime and from mime into other action as seamlessly and smoothly as possible rather than getting them to draw attention to the mime passages by stopping before and after they have delivered them.

 

Ratmansky's source material is not only drawn from the Stepanov notation and material from the Russian archives he is also using material from at least one Western source namely material which a man called  Henri Justament used when staging ballet in France in the mid nineteenth century.  There is a great deal of material relating to Justament's career staging ballets safely housed in two European archives . However the notebook containing the material relating to Giselle is in neither of them. It came to light in Frankfurt some years ago and fortunately its value was recognised. Its importance lies in the fact that the Justament material predates

Petipa's version of Giselle, the source of all modern productions of the ballet, by thirty or more years. Although it is now disputed at one time it was thought that the Justament notebook had been used to stage the last revival of Giselle at the POB before the Franco-Prussian War. What ever the date when it was being used  Justament's Giselle notebook brings us much closer to Giselle in its original form than the standard Petipa version of the ballet does.

 

The 2015 Petipa Conference  held in Bordeaux  was told that the Justament material had been used by Pacific North West Ballet when the company staged their Giselle in 2014 with both Doug Fullington and Marian Smith acting as advisers on such matters as the text, performance style and mime. Marian Smith spoke about the structure of ballets in the 1830's and 1840's describing them as not unlike operas of the same period. She told the conference that at the time of Giselle's creation mime played a far more significant part in a ballet's structure than audiences are used to experiencing today with a balance of about 40% mime to 60 % dance being quite usual. She spoke of Adam's deep involvement in the creation of the ballet saying that he had been present in the rehearsal room as the ballet was being created and that the score not only incorporated the action of various characters such as Albrecht knocking at Giselle's door but that it followed French speech patterns and was, at times, literally music which spoke. She said that they had discovered that the Justament material, in which passages of mime are written out in full, did not fit the traditional score but when they obtained a copy of the violin reduction used by the ballet master Titus who had staged the ballet in St Petersburg in 1842 they discovered that the mime fitted the music in the reduction perfectly.

 

What we see on stage will of course represent Ratmansky's own artistic choices.I wonder whether he has been brave enough to abandon the anachronistic press lifts in favour of showing Giselle gliding across the ground ?  The streamed performance in January is certainly something to look forward to seeing. Let us hope that the Bolshoi bring this production with them when they next visit London.

 

 

Edited November 26, 2019 by FLOSS

[CHazell2]

Thank you FLOSS for that informative reply - I had no idea that Ratmansky had used the Justament notebooks, if he has - then it would be wonderful and interesting to see.

 

I remember seeing a streamed PNB video called Giselle Revisited in which various bits of mime were demonstrated and I have to say that everything was clear and the story became much more coherent. So it is a combination of the notations and the Justament source.

 

Sounds like this is something to see.

[stucha]

a very interesting review of 2 casts, the second of which raises some fears in the reviewer about the possible future of the production.  ( there are also some hilarious mistranslations)

 

If you open it in Chrome you can read it with the help of Google Translate.

 

 

https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4170628