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Leningrad's Best-kept Secret
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17371 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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1 / 1990 |
1,486 Words |
| Author
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Don McDonagh
Don McDonagh is a dance writer and critic based in
New York. |
The Soviet Union has many secrets, and one of the best kept is that of the Maly Ballet of Leningrad. Maly means "small" in Russian, but this is hardly an accurate description of a hundred-member company that performs four times weekly during its regular August to May season and that has toured Eastern and Western Europe as well as the Far East.
Unlike the Kirov Ballet, however, it has yet to tour North America, remaining somewhat in the shadow of the larger company. The Kirov has slightly over two hundred dancers and a theater seating twenty-five hundred, nearly twice the size of the Maly theater.
The Kirov company traces its origins to 1738, whereas the resident opera and ballet companies of the Maly Theater date from the early twentieth century - the opera being founded in 1915 and the ballet in 1933. The building housing them was previously named the Mikhailovsky Theater, and specialized in presenting plays in French for the elite of St. Petersburg. Fyodor Lopukov (1889-1973) was the first artistic director of the Maly Ballet, and his spirit is still omnipresent. Lopukov was an adventurous choreographer praised for the musical sensitivity of his ballets and an early influence on George Balanchine, whom he cast with other young dancers in his controversial Dance Symphony, presented at the Kirov in 1923.
Experimental Productions
Lopukov started the Maly with a core of thirty dancers, and its first production was a revival of Marius Petipa's Harlequinade which, in revised form, remains in its repertory to the present. The original Petipa also
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