The mighty Bolshoi is coming to Australia, for a season exclusive to Brisbane, where it is presenting the full-length Le Corsaire and The Bright Stream.
IT’S ALMOST impossible to believe that anybody could be sent to jail for creating a ballet, but that is what appears to have happened to Adrian Piotrovsky. Piotrovsky (1898-1937) was a Russian dramaturge. He was one of the three main collaborators on the ballet The Limpid Stream (changed in today’s version to The Bright Stream). The others were Fyodor Lopukhov, artistic director of the Bolshoi from 1935 to 36, and the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975). At the time of their collaboration, communism was firmly entrenched, Stalin was in power and all art was forced to comply with the dictates of “socialist realism”, which glorified the working class and its struggle for emancipation. Artists lived in terror of crossing the accepted formula, knowing they could be banned or imprisoned for any perceived “elitism” or “decadence”. In The Limpid Stream, the trio must have thought they had a perfect subject – it was set in a collective farm.
But they severely misjudged. The ballet was condemned as a bourgeois and insulting to Russian farmers. The consequences for the collaborators were terrible. Lophukov was stripped of his job as director and did not choreograph a serious ballet again. Shostakovich’s reputation was further blackened and he never wrote another ballet composition. Piotrovsky was arrested by the secret police and sent to the gulag. Two years later he was shot.
Watching this bright, funny ballet today, one can only weep at the perversity of the those who condemned it. No record of the original choreography exists, but Ratmansky, using Lupokhov’s original libretto and Shostakovich’s music, has unearthed a hilarious and delightful story ballet, acclaimed wherever it goes as a “comic masterpiece”. A glimpse on youtube reveals cross-dressing Sylphs, dogs on bikes and giant vegetables.
Ratmansky has not only produced a new ballet, but gone some way to righting a terrible wrong. . . .
This is an excerpt from a feature by Karen van Ulzen in the April/May issue of Dance Australia . OUT NOW!
Maria Alexandrova in Le Corsaire. Photo: Damir Yusupov.
