Ballet paquita summary of the time of the performance. Classic queen care

Paquita is a ballet to music by composer Edouard Deldevez with subsequent musical additions by composer Ludwig Minkus.
Libretto by Paul Foucher and Joseph Mazilier. The literary basis was the short story by Miguel Cervantes "Gypsy Girl".
The first performance took place in Paris, on the stage of the Grand Opera, on April 1, 1846, staged by choreographer Joseph Mazilier to music by Ernest Deldevez

Characters:
Lucien d'Hervilly

Inigo, head of the gypsy camp
Don Lopez de Mendoza, provincial governor in Spain
Comte d'Hervilli, French general, father of Lucien
Sculptor
Paquita
Doña Serafina, Don Lopez's sister
Countess, mother of the Count d'Hervilli
Young gypsy.

Summary:

In Spain, the beautiful Paquita lives in a gypsy camp. But she's not a gypsy. Her appearance in the camp is connected with some terrible crime of 1795 and is shrouded in mystery. Paquita carefully keeps a miniature portrait of her father, but who he is and why he was killed is unknown to her. She was very young and only remembers how someone took her away.
But here in the valley in the vicinity of Saragossa, where the gypsy camp lives, the Comte d'Hervilly, a French general, arrives. He demands to erect a monument to his brother Karl, who was once killed with his wife and daughter in this very place.
Meanwhile, the governor of the Spanish province, Lopez de Mendoza, is plotting how to marry his sister Serafina to Lucien d'Hervilli. And Inigo, the head of the gypsy camp, weaves his own intrigues - he wants to achieve the love of the beautiful Paquita. However, he notices that tender feelings flare up between Lucien and Paquita. Inigo comes to the governor, Don Lopez de Mendoza, and they develop a plan to destroy Lucien: make him drink wine mixed with sleeping pills, and then specially hired assassins will come.
But their plans are not destined to come true - Paquita heard their conversation and saves Lucien by changing bottles of wine and giving Inigo sleeping pills. The hired killers, having received an order to kill the one who is in the house, instead of Lucien kill Inigo himself by mistake.
And the main characters, Paquita and Lucien d'Hervilli, together, alive and unharmed after all the troubles, come to the place where a big ball is being prepared and where a portrait of the murdered hero Charles d'Hervilli is fashioned.
Paquita tells about the betrayal of the governor, and he is arrested. And in the portrait of the deceased hero, by comparing it with the image in her medallion, she recognizes her own father.

The history of the creation of the ballet.

The premiere of the two-act performance took place on April 1, 1846 in Paris, at the Grand Opera.
In the main roles: Paquita - Carlotta Grisi, Lucien - Lucien Petipa; as Inigo - Pearson.
At the Paris Opera, the ballet went on until 1851, while the performer of the main part, Carlotta Grisi, worked there (then she went to her common-law spouse, choreographer Jules Perrot, in Russia, where she received a contract for two seasons and where Paquita was among the performed parts).
But real success awaited this ballet a year and a half later in Russia, where it received the name "Paquita" and was repeatedly staged and continues its stage life to this day.
The production in Russia was the next after the Paris premiere, it turned from a two-act into a three-act and was held in the St. Petersburg imperial troupe on the stage of the Bolshoy Kamenny Theater on September 26, 1847 with Deldevez's music, instrumented by K. N. Lyadov and with the addition of new gallop music.
Marius Petipa repeated the same production at the Moscow Imperial Troupe, at the Bolshoi Theater, on November 23, 1848, performing the main roles together with his partner E. Andreyanova.
On December 27, 1881, the St. Petersburg Imperial Troupe on the stage of the Bolshoi Stone Theater showed a new version of the ballet by choreographer Marius Petipa, where the music of Deldevez was supplemented by the music of Minkus, for which M. Petipa specially invented several dance scenes.
Marius Petipa's version of the ballet did not disappear. It was preserved by N. G. Sergeev, who at the beginning of the 20th century recorded the ballet repertoire of the St. Petersburg imperial troupe according to the system of choreographic recording of his teacher V. I. Stepanov. Having left for emigration, N. G. Sergeev took all the recordings with him and used them himself repeatedly, staging ballet performances on various stages where life threw him. Now his collection is stored in the USA, in the library of Harvard University, and is available to all ballet figures.
In 2000, Marius Petipa's version of these recordings was restored by Pierre Lacotte for the Paris Grand Opera. The ballet thus returned - though not in its original form, but in the version of Marius Petipa - to the stage from which its history began.

The solemn procession of ballet companies dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the birth of our ballet "everything" Marius Petipa continues. Paquita at the Ural Opera Ballet (Yekaterinburg) joined the festive ranks of demonstrators led by Don Quixote at the Leonid Yakobson Theater. I attended the premiere on February 22 and 23 bloha_v_svitere . This "Paquita" is doomed to become a hit and the brightest phenomenon of the current ballet season, although its appearance was preceded by the tragic and sudden death of the director Sergei Vikharev at the beginning of the rehearsal process. Premiere performances received a memorial status, Yekaterinburg - the most unusual, fascinating and absolutely unpredictable "Paquita", choreographer Vyacheslav Samodurov - an unplanned ballet that he had to complete and release into free swimming. A brilliant stylist and reenactor of classical choreography Sergey Vikharev, in collaboration with Pavel Gershenzon, composed a completely provocative performance, without changing a single plot line of the 1846 libretto by Paul Fouche and Joseph Mazilier and carefully packing all the more or less preserved choreography by Petipa into a traveling bag. In the Yekaterinburg "Paquita" there is not a single formal change in the script and choreography familiar at the level of instincts. Still kidnapped in childhood, a French aristocrat considers herself a Spanish gypsy, rejects the claims of the head of the camp Inigo, falls in love with a brilliant officer and saves his life, destroying a complex plot with poisoned wine, four murderers and a secret passage in the fireplace; identifies the murdered parents by family portraits and marries the rescued handsome man. The soloists of Pas de trois sing the same, the ballet refrain-bundle that has set the teeth on edge, “glissade - zhete, glideslope - zhete”, they still prance in the wedding Grand pas “fours” and “twos” in the textbook “Spanish” chant “pa galya - pa Galya - cabriole - pose. But this is perceived by archaeological artifacts found during the construction of, say, a bridge, and built into it as evidence of the existence of civilization in this particular place.

Yes, Yekaterinburg's Paquita is a bridge that boldly connected the unconnected: the island of a ballet legend of the 19th century with the materialistic reality of the 21st century, leaning on the choreographic rationalism of the 20th century. Its chief designers Vikharev and Gershenzon confidently hammered the piles of fantasy into the shaky ground of non-obvious ballet documentaries, established the pillars of iron logic, despite the powerful counter current of historical anecdotes and incidents, and streamlined the movement in both directions - from historicism to modernity and back. Paquita of the 19th century, sitting in a gypsy wagon, arrived in the third millennium at the wheel of her own racing car, not at all surprised by the transformations that had taken place.

The authors of the performance placed three acts of "Paquita" in three different eras with an approximate step of 80 years. The first act, with a leisurely exposition, with the introduction of the main characters, with the beginning of the conflict (neither the Spanish governor nor the director of the gypsy camp like officer Lucien, who decide to kill him for this), lulls the audience with a high-quality reconstruction of one of the iconic performances of the heyday of ballet romanticism . It has everything you expect from "Paquita" and Mr. Vikharev, a brilliant connoisseur of archival choreography: naivety of stage positions, inventive and bewitching dances, detailed pantomime dialogues, ideal heroes, lovely costumes from Elena Zaitseva, in which the dancers bathe in the lush foam of frills and ruffle.

A touched and lost vigilance viewer in the second act expects a shocking awakening. It seems that the authors of the performance were only waiting for the moment to tear off all this false romantic veil, shamefully stretched over a different physical entity. The most melodramatic almost half-hour pantomime scene, extremely loved by balletomanes for its virtuoso acting, even in the case of the most meticulous stylization of the methods of the ballet theater of the mid-19th century, would look ridiculous, at best, archaic. The stage director, like Bulgakov's Woland, conducts a session of magic with its subsequent exposure, transferring a vulgar (generally) scene to an ideally appropriate aesthetic environment for it: to the silent cinema of the early twentieth century. The puzzle pieces fit perfectly! The hairy-eyed handsome Lucien and the femme fatale Paquita, goggle-eyed with long eyelashes, are actively giving cues that are projected onto the screen; sinister scumbags brandishing sharp knives with terrifying grimaces; the ideal scoundrel (Gleb Sageev and Maxim Klekovkin), demonically laughing, does his vile deed and falls victim to his own cunning, writhing picturesquely in death agony. The action is rapidly rushing to the denouement, the brilliant pianist-demiurge German Markhasin (and, as you know, young Dmitry Shostakovich worked as a pianist in cinemas) ruthlessly crushes romantic illusions, which in the third act, drunk with coffee from a coffee machine, are resurrected to sum up and sing of those the eternal values ​​contained in Petipov's Grand pas.

But before the Grand pas, you still have to make your way through the dense layer of people having a rest during the intermission of the performance in the theatrical buffet of artists. In the new reality, Lucien and Paquita become the premieres of the ballet troupe, Lucien's dad becomes the director of the theater, the Spanish governor, who planned the murder of the main character, becomes the general sponsor of the troupe. Vyacheslav Samodurov, Nostradamus of our time, already two days before the final predicted the victory of Russian hockey players at the Olympics, putting a TV broadcast of the match on the stage of the theater he directed. Dramatic reality, sports and theatrical, are intertwined: against the backdrop of sweet hockey victories, the nameless orphan Pakhita is acquired, theatrical corruption is exposed, and arrests and holidays are combined, crowned with a wedding Grand pas.

The grand pas is danced almost perfectly: a well-trained troupe cuts through the space of the stage quite synchronously, flashing cabriols and seducing with cancan ambuate. In the Grand pas, the heads of the dancers are decorated not with "Spanish" crests protruding victoriously from the kits, but with charming French hats from the Moulin Rouge, and on their feet - black leotards and black pointe shoes, which, coupled with charming smiles, give Petipa's most bronzed academic choreography a purely Parisian flair, playfulness and frivolity, completely etched in the last century. Miki Nishiguchi and Ekaterina Sapogova perform the main part with sweet French swagger and careless indifference, they do not look for industrial records in the choreography and do not “fry” fouettes with an air of ultimate truth, but all their dance statements are impeccably accurate and brilliantly articulated. Alexey Seliverstov and Alexander Merkushev, who took turns playing the role of Lucien, appreciated the plastic variability proposed by the directors - the ideal sweetheart in the first act, the reflexive neurotic hero in the second, and the aristocrat-premier, impeccable in everything, in the third.

But Paquita became such thanks to the composer Yuri Krasavin, the author of the “free transcription” of the score by Eduard Deldevez and Ludwig Minkus. He created a musical breakthrough, reincarnating unpretentious tunes and chants into a powerful polyphonic sound of an incredibly solid and captivating work. These transformations and the musical charades conceived by Mr. Krasavin plunge one into a frenzy of delight. The accordion and xylophone introduced into the orchestra and the increased role of percussion, sometimes cautiously delicate, sometimes chopping from the shoulder and preparing an “applause” pas, gave the score of “Paquita” by Krasavin even more plasticity and “Frenchness”. However, the blows of the whip in the most energetically intense moments do not allow you to lull yourself into the charm of a deceptively old ballet.

They placed Petipa's renewed choreography in a fundamentally new theatrical context. After the tragic death of Vikharev, who untimely passed away in June last year, Vyacheslav Samodurov, artistic director of the Yekaterinburg Ballet, continued work on the project. Today the site publishes two fragments from the premiere booklet of "Paquita", kindly provided by the theater to the editors - a conversation between Dmitry Renansky and composer Yuri Krasavin and a dialogue between Bogdan Korolok and Vyacheslav Samodurov.

Sergey Vikharev managed to stage several fragments of Paquita. After his sudden death, the production fell on your shoulders. Did you have a choice - to embody Vikharev's ideas or to do something of your own?

The concept of the future performance was developed before my eyes, everything was discussed in detail, so that I understood the essence of the project and did not consider myself entitled to change anything radically. Everything that Sergey managed to do, we kept, following his wishes. My task in this project is to bring everything together, deliver the missing episodes and convey first to the artists, and then to the viewer.

- To work, it was necessary to master Stepanov's dance recording system from scratch.

I am very grateful to my assistant Klara Dovzhik, who took the brunt of the decryption. When it became clear that "Paquita" fell on my shoulders and I needed to master an unfamiliar cipher in a very short time, put on game scenes and reduce the whole performance, I caught fire with this thought: every new work is a jump into the unknown, and for me a high level of adrenaline there is a pleasant sensation in the blood. Soon the adrenaline was gone and I realized what a hell of a job it was.

- Will you continue to work with notation and old choreography?

Don't know. I'm more interested in building new ships than repairing old ones. This is a noble undertaking, and I have great respect for those colleagues who devote many years of work to this. We need to keep in touch with the past.

At the time of the production, you had access to a recording of the Munich Paquita, where the same notation was deciphered by choreographer Alexei Ratmansky and musicologist Doug Fallington; before my eyes were a fresh performance of the Mariinsky Theater, Grand pas in the versions of the Bolshoi Theater and the Leningrad Maly Opera. Do you know the version well?Grand pas , which was performed at the Mariinsky Theater in the Soviet years - until recently it was also performed in Yekaterinburg. Weren't you confused by such an abundance of versions, contradicting each other in many details? Or did you turn a blind eye to everything and act strictly according to the records?

It is impossible to close your eyes to what has been done before you and say that we are starting from scratch. The numbers from Paquita that have come down to us have changed over time: this is a fait accompli, a process that I find it difficult to give a positive or negative assessment.

In the notation of Nikolai Sergeev, the lines for recording the positions of the head, body and hands are mostly left empty. Basically, only the movements of the legs are recorded - but in extreme detail. The geography is also clearly defined. We borrowed hand coordination from old television recordings, in particular, from a 1958 film. I noticed that the older the tape, the closer it is to the notation in terms of the details of the text and geography - the performance style is more strict, less pretentious, and at the same time no less danceable. You can talk about how under the influence of [Agrippina] Vaganova the school and the manner of performance changed, the details of the choreography changed - but the people on these recordings are still closer to Petipa than any of us.

We tried to restore the structure of the key dance ensembles, first of all - Grand pas. The next generations after Petipa introduced great variability into it. In the text Grand pas we returned to the Petipa scheme, when the same combination was persistently repeated from one foot and each time became shorter in duration - everything worked to increase the dynamics. Some combinations of movements recorded in notation are almost impossible to perform today. Basically, all the links were repeated three times, and not two or two and a half, as is customary today - the artists do not have time to take a breath.

"Paquita" is a new play based on old material.

There is an ingenious simplicity and ingenious rudeness in this approach. Perhaps the twentieth century was not always able to appreciate these qualities, taking them for the poverty of the language - it tried to preserve the heritage, improving it according to current ideas. If we compare the notation Grand pas and pas de trois With their modern versions, you can see how the choreographic text has leveled off: complex fragments have become noticeably lighter, simple combinations have become more virtuosic.

At the same time, one can understand the desire of the directors to infiltrate Petipa's choreography. For example, text Adagio in Grand pas, unlike the other numbers, is almost not recorded, and it is difficult to understand who is the anchor in it - the corps de ballet or the soloists. The notation leaves the feeling that the female ensemble walked around the stage, and the soloists posed rather than danced in today's sense of the word. Of course, Adagio, which you will see in our performance, contains a layer of text left by the next generations.

Besides, in Grand pas we changed the diagonal formations of the corps de ballet along the wings to straight lines - this is due to the parameters of the Yekaterinburg stage and the new scenography.

After your words, the question arises: doesn't reconstruction imply a 100% restoration of the text where possible?

Reconstruction - suggests. I don't want to argue whether an honest reconstruction is possible today and whether it is necessary.

Our production is not a reconstruction. Yekaterinburg "Paquita" is a new performance based on old material. A transcription of the old music by Deldevez and Minkus was ordered for it, a new set design was made - and the finished product carries completely different ideas than the 1881 performance. Why should I, today's viewer, watch Paquita as it was 130 years ago, if it is devoid of artistic relevance? Mediocre music, stupid plot, disproportionately few dances (albeit good ones) in relation to the melodrama.

Yekaterinburg Opera and Ballet Theater

By the way, about melodrama: how to deal with game scenes today? Is it possible to completely restore them - or is the language of the old pantomime lost?

Sergeev's pantomime is recorded as conversational dialogues, and the arrows and crosses show the movements of the artists and the position of objects on the stage. The dialogues recorded by Sergeev cannot be conveyed in today's pantomime language, most of the gestures have not been preserved. You can come up with new gestures - but who will understand them?

The plot of "Paquita" is vaudeville and ridiculous for today. In the first act, from the point of view of psychological theatre, which for the Russian audience still remains the main form of existence of the theater, there are many absurd things. Gypsy Inigo pesters Paquita - she dances, tries to hug - she dances, tells her about love - she dances, makes her collect money - she dances. Open day in a psychiatric clinic.

In the old edition of the libretto, there is a remark on this score: Paquita begins to dance, as if wanting to forget her oppressive thoughts.

Maybe the huge verbal descriptions in the libretto were required to somehow justify the stupidity on stage. At the time of Paquita, such conventions already looked strange - it was for them that the ballets of Petipa and his predecessors were heavily beaten in the press.

Initially, Sergei [Vikharev] and Pavel [Gershenzon] set the task: three acts - three artistic directions. The first act is solved in the traditional way. In the second, I re-staged all the mise-en-scenes, because in our performance, compared to the original, the stage context has radically changed. The same applies to the third act.

Yekaterinburg Opera and Ballet Theater

Until now, we have been talking about your participation in Paquita as a choreographer. What does this project mean for you as a company leader and for the theatre?

The idea of ​​"Paquita" is powerful, analytically verified, it will captivate both those spectators who are used to working with their heads, and those who come to the theater to relax.

In my opinion, the Ekaterinburg audience just wants to be surprised by an unusual idea, people come to our theater for something special. This "Paquita" is intended for a very wide audience - both for young people and for lovers of traditional art. Of course, there are extreme conservatives, but the essence of art lies in its development.

Before starting work, Sergey and Pavel asked me many times: “Do you really need this? Are you not afraid? But I am proud that they came to our theater with this project, because they consider it capable of creative frenzy.

In the house of a noble Spanish nobleman, a celebration is held on the occasion of the wedding of the beautiful Paquita and Lucien. A magnificent ball opens with a children's mazurka. In the solo dance, Paquita's friends demonstrate virtuoso skills. The festive action ends with the dance of the main characters - Paquita and Lucien.

History reference

"Paquita" - this is how the Grand Pas is briefly called today to the music of Ludwig Minkus from the ballet of the same name, staged by Marius Petipa. The first ballet with this name was staged in Paris in 1846. The authors of the music and choreography were Joseph Mazilier and Edouard Deldevez. The performance enjoyed great success in Paris and London, and therefore it is not surprising that "Paquita" was the first performance that the 29-year-old Marius Petipa staged in St. Petersburg.
The image of the main character and the main storylines of the performance are borrowed from the short story "Gypsy Girl" by Miguel Cervantes Saavedra.

Paquita is a young beauty and a wonderful dancer. She was born into a noble family, but as a child she was kidnapped by gypsies and wanders around Spain with a gypsy camp. As a result of various incidents, Paquita learns the truth about her family, finds her lost relatives and her fiancé, a young nobleman Lucien who is in love with her. The happy ending to a tangled story is the magnificent wedding of Paquita and Lucien.

The success of "Paquita" on the St. Petersburg stage exceeded all expectations. And yet, a few years later, this pantomime ballet gave way to productions by the famous French choreographers Jules Perrot and Arthur Saint-Leon in the repertoire.
Marius Petipa returned to Paquita thirty years later, when he had already staged the ballets Pharaoh's Daughter, Don Quixote and La Bayadère. The reason for the resumption of "Paquita" was the benefit performance of the ballerina Ekaterina Vazem. For the new performance, at the request of Petipa, the composer Ludwig Minkus wrote the grand pas, which became the culmination of the entire ballet. Thanks to the classic Grand Pas, the wedding ball turned into a brilliant choreographic composition.

In Soviet times, Paquita disappeared from the theater repertoires, and the final Grand Pas, having retained only the name from the old ballet, began an independent life and today adorns the repertoire of many theaters around the world. The form of the extended dance scene - Grand Pas - corresponds to the general canon of the choreographic structures of a classical performance: entre, adagio, variation, coda. Bravura and synchronicity mark the front entrances of the corps de ballet and soloists. Then follow the female variations of the soloists. Each of the Paquita variations is a small masterpiece with its own character and style. And on top of all this splendor is the leading ballet couple, demonstrating the academicism and beauty of classical dance.

After watching "Paquita", you will certainly understand the balletomanes of past centuries, who after the performance followed the ballerina's carriage or drank champagne from the ballet shoe of their goddess with pleasure.

The director of the Grand Pas from the ballet "Paquita" on the Belarusian stage is the famous St. Petersburg teacher and choreographer Pavel Stalinsky. A graduate of the Leningrad Academic Choreographic School named after A. Ya. Vaganova, for a number of years he performed on the stage of the Leningrad Opera and Ballet Theater named after Kirov (now the Mariinsky Theater) and the Leningrad Academic Maly Opera and Ballet Theater (now the Mikhailovsky Theater). At the invitation of the outstanding Russian dancer Konstantin Sergeyev, he took part in the production of the ballet Le Corsaire at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.
Pavel Stalinsky has been cooperating with the Belarusian State Choreographic College for many years. In 1996, for the National Opera Theater of the Republic of Belarus, Pavel Stalinsky staged the ballet scene Polovtsian Dances (choreography by Mikhail Fokin) in A. Borodin's opera Prince Igor. The classical ballet La Bayadere (choreography by Marius Petipa), staged by him in 2005, is performing with great success on the stage of the National Ballet Theater of Belarus.

The ballet season at the Bolshoi Theater was opened by the French. It was the second part of the return tour of the Paris Opera Ballet Company. Or, rather, the return of a forgotten debt, which Brigitte Lefebvre remembered before her departure from the post of head of the Paris Opera Ballet.

She had long wanted to bring the Parisian Paquita by Pierre Lacotte to the historical stage of the Bolshoi, but the tour visit of the Opera Ballet (February 2011) coincided with the height of the renovation, and the Parisians showed small-format ballets on the New Stage: Suite in White by Serge Lifar, Arlesian » Roland Petit and «Park» by Angelin Preljocaj.

Neither Rudolf Nureyev nor Pierre Lacotte - the authors of large staged performances, the so-called Parisian exclusive from the category of classics - did not get into the company of the "brought" choreographers.

Two years ago, the Bolshoi Theater introduced a convenient practice - to open the season with a tour of some serious European theater.

In 2011, the Real Madrid Theater came with Kurt Weill's opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, in 2012 - La Scala showed its new Don Juan. The tour of the Paris Opera Ballet with Paquita fit perfectly into the scheme. And the bar of the artistic level of visitors is kept high.

However, these are all explanatory formalities. The message of the Paris tour is different.

Those who follow the events in France know that the Paris Opera Ballet is on the verge of change.

In 2014, the troupe will be headed by a new artistic director - a choreographer from Bordeaux, husband of Natalie Portman, ex-premier of New York City Ballet, Benjamin Millepied.

Yes, of course, Brigitte Lefebvre, the long-term leader of the famous company, was not the guardian of the classical heritage, on the contrary, she promoted modern dance to the repertoire with all her might. But she also baked about the local treasure - the ballets of Nureyev and Lacotte. As well as the fact that choreographers or dancers who want to reincarnate as choreographers of French origin should have priority for new productions in the theater.

Again, this does not mean that racism was promoted. Lefebvre invited both Israeli and Algerian choreographers to the productions, and any others who were “in discourse”. Millepied was twice among such promising invited Frenchmen - with very mediocre works "Amoveo" and "Triad", which were pulled to the proper level by the brilliant feet of Parisian dancers and the design of fashion designers.

However, xenophobia has historically taken place at the Paris Opera School.

Various capable children are accepted to the school, but after graduation, only holders of a French passport can get into the corps de ballet of the main ballet theater of the country. It's cruel, but generally fair. Each theater has its own characteristics, and the institution of French ballet, as the oldest in the world, has the right to its own eccentricities, the result of which has always been a high level of skill and, most importantly, stylistic unity.

Wherever the ballet dancer of the Paris Opera comes, he always carries the French style in himself - this is the manner of performance, the technique and a special stage culture.

The same can be said about the ballerinas of the Mariinsky Theatre, partly about the artists of the Bolshoi Theater, and about the soloists of the Royal Danish Ballet, that is, about the representatives of the oldest national companies.

And that's all - just these three or four theaters.

Is this elitism good or bad in the era of globalization?

From the point of view of a balletomane, it is undoubtedly good. Because around these pillar theaters there are other wonderful theaters where a mixture of styles, techniques and nationalities is in honor. These are the American Ballet Theater (ABT), La Scala Ballet, New York City Ballet, Covent Garden Ballet, English National Ballet, Berlin State Ballet, Vienna Opera Ballet and a few more. In addition, there are author's theaters, such as the Hamburg Ballet (Neumeier's repertoire) or the Stuttgart Ballet (Cranko).

Time makes adjustments. Both in Denmark and in Paris, at the same time, there was a problem of a shortage of talented students with the “correct” passport to the theater. There are two ways out of this situation - either change the charter and take foreigners from among the best graduates, or take all the French in a row.

Denmark is already taking everyone in a row, since the country is small, and the problem does not begin at graduation, but right at the reception - there is a shortage of Danish children.

And now a girl of any origin with the appropriate data can enter the School of the Royal Danish Ballet, and boys are taken even without data, as long as they go. But the Danes didn’t have xenophobia even before, it’s just that Danish children were enough to fill the ballet classes.

France is still at the level of a school, because there, as in Russia, where, in addition to the Moscow State Academy of Arts and the ARB (Vaganovka), there are a dozen more ballet schools, which can feed two metropolitan schools, not one school, but several. And all the same, the personnel problem for the French is not far off, and it will have to be solved somehow, and, most likely, at the expense of "non-French".

Meanwhile, the future artistic director of the Paris Opera Ballet, Benjamin Millepied, sees no threat in the fact that strangers will enter the theater.

Furthermore. He has already managed to arouse the indignation of the etoiles with his statements in the press. His enlightened Americanized look of a refined company lacks African Americans with their extraordinary plasticity and techniques. A normal statement from a man who has never danced at the Paris Opera and never even went to a famous school.

Moreover, it will not be difficult for him to recruit plastic non-Europeans into the troupe at the beginning of the next season. Four étoiles are retiring at once - Nureyev's "chickens" Nicolas Leriche (he says goodbye in the summer of 2014 in Notre Dame Cathedral by Roland Petit) and Agnes Letestu (her farewell performance - "The Lady of the Camellias" by John Neumeier will take place on October 10 this year), as well as Aurelie Dupont (in the ballet "Manon" in autumn 2014) and Isabelle Ciaravola in March 2014 as Tatyana in "Onegin" by G. Cranko.

By law, a Paris Opera Ballet dancer retires at forty-two and a half years old!

But in the group of the first dancers, from where, in theory, they should nominate future stars for vacant positions, there are no suitable candidates in such a quantity. It is clear that in a year you can manage to promote someone from the lower ranks to the first dancers, but these people will then have to “pull” the most difficult parts in classical ballets. Therefore, Millepied's idea of ​​"diluting" the troupe with professionals from the outside, no matter how mediocre and tasteless it may seem, is likely to be realized. And everything, everything will change.

But while Brigitte Lefebvre is at the helm, there are no vacancies in her troupe, on the contrary, there are excellent dancers with whom she fought side by side for 20 years for the purity and identity of the French style.

She was and remains a friend of the Bolshoi Theater - with her filing, Moscow artists were invited to one-time performances: Nikolai Tsiskaridze danced La Bayadère and The Nutcracker, Maria Alexandrova danced Raymonda, Svetlana Lunkina danced The Nutcracker and Vain Precaution, Natalya Opipov - "The Nutcracker". And secondly, thanks to the agreements between Lefebvre and Iksanov, the Bolshoi Ballet Company began touring regularly in Paris.

Brought to Moscow, "Paquita" is a farewell shot of the Paris Opera Ballet of the era of Brigitte Lefevre.

A beautiful gesture of the avant-garde queen, who wants to be remembered in Russia not only as a propagandist of existential wallowing.

This version of Paquita premiered in 2001. The French were then a little worried that the Bolshoi Theater, where the premiere of Pierre Lacotte's ballet "The Pharaoh's Daughter" based on Petipa, had taken place with resounding success the year before, would intercept its main connoisseur and reenactor of romantic antiquity from the Paris Opera. By this time, the theater's repertoire included his regularly renewed La Sylphide and the rare Marco Spada.

Lacotte's revision of Paquita dates back to the premiere performance of 1846, with choreography by Joseph Mazilier that has not survived.

The choreographer relied on unique documents that he discovered in Germany, which are a complete description of the mise-en-scenes, the first edition of the pantomime and two variations of Mazilier, marked and written by the choreographer's hand, plus a description of the performance design.

All this was needed to turn into a full-fledged performance "The Big Classical Pas" - a masterpiece excerpt from "Paquita" by Marius Petipa, which survived the time. These are the well-known children's mazurka, pas de trois, virtuoso female variations, pathetic pas de de deux Paquita and Lucien and the common entre, which have successfully existed for a hundred years in a plotless mode.

The first French "Paquita" of 1846 arose in the wake of the passion of the then choreographers for the legends of the Iberian Peninsula.

Spain, on the one hand, was seen as a country in which incredible stories could take place with the abduction of children by gypsies and robbery raids - such stories actively nourished French romantic ballet. On the other hand, Spain was famous as the birthplace of all kinds of folk-characteristic dances - gypsy, bolero, kachuchi. Tambourines, tambourines, castanets, cloaks - these accessories became an integral part of the ballets of that time.

The literary basis of "Paquita" was the short story "Gypsy Girl" by M. Cervantes.

Late 30s - 40s. the century before last, in general, passed under the sign of ballet gypsies. In St. Petersburg in 1838, Philippe Taglioni staged the ballet La Gitana for Maria Taglioni. Joseph Mazilier staged La Gipsy for Fanny Elsler before Paquita. The first performer of Paquita was the no less eminent French ballerina Carlotta Grisi. At the same time, the premiere of Jules Perrot's ballet Esmeralda, the main gypsy ballet hit of the 19th century, took place in London.

But the gypsy theme in "Paquita" is revealed somewhat differently than in "Esmeralda".

The word "gypsies" in romantic ballet was understood in a sense as an epithet for "theatrical robbers". So the libretto of "Paquita" tells about the extraordinary fate of a girl who lives in a gypsy camp according to its laws - dancing, she earns her living. However, her origin is shrouded in mystery - the girl has a medallion depicting a French aristocrat, hinting at her noble parent.

And in "Esmeralda" the word "gypsy" means - "beggar", "persecuted", "homeless", and gypsy life in the ballet is not shrouded in any romance. In this sense, the first Parisian "Paquita" is closer to "Catarina, the robber's daughter" by J. Perrot. "Paquita" is a late romantic ballet, the plot of which is based on a melodrama beloved by visitors to theaters on the Grands Boulevards.

As a result, Lacotte, whom we know as a first-class director of dances in the style of the Romantic era, restores in his Paquita - from notes, engravings, sketches, reviews and articles by poets and literary critics of the level of Théophile Gautier - all pantomime mise-en-scenes.

In the play there is a whole picture of the “Camp of Gypsies”, which practically does not contain dances, but is full of the most dramatic pantomime, from which Gauthier was once delighted.

It is difficult to compare the acting abilities of the first performer Paquita Carlotta Grisi and today's ballerinas Ludmila Pagliero and Alice Renavan, but this picture itself, which is a revived engraving, looks harmonious, partly reminiscent of a dramatic intermission.

Paquita, in love with the French officer Lucien d'Ervilly, overhears the conversation between the gypsy Inigo and the Spanish governor, who are going to make him drink sleeping pills and then kill Lucien - the first out of jealousy, and the second - because of hatred for the French and unwillingness to marry his daughter Serafina to the son of the hated general. Paquita warns Lucien of the danger, swaps Lucien's and Inigo's glasses, he falls asleep before he has time to commit the atrocity, and the couple escapes safely through a secret door in the fireplace.

In the previous picture, the content was told mainly through dance. This is the Spanish dance with tambourines, and the gypsy dance of Paquita, and variations of Lucien and the notorious Dance with cloaks (Danse de capes), which was once performed by travesty dancers, given to men by Lacotte, and the pas de trois, transcribed in a different in Petipa's manner.

Therefore, the “pedestrian” picture serves as a transition to the next dance act in its entirety - a ball at General d’Hervilli,

to which Paquita and Lucien, out of breath from the chase, run in belatedly. The girl exposes the insidious governor and along the way discovers on the wall a portrait of a man with features familiar from her medallion. This is her father, the brother of the general, who was killed many years ago. Paquita immediately accepts Lucien's proposal, which she had previously delicately rejected, considering herself an unworthy commoner, puts on a beautiful wedding tutu, and the ball continues in the mode of that very favorite “gran pas” by balletomanes of all times and peoples to the music of Minkus, complicated by Lacotte in the French manner.

In an interview, Lacotte repeatedly said that "the Paquita technique requires more liveliness than lyricism."

And "ballerinas need to match the old allegro technique, which is gradually disappearing." Paquita exits are a chain of small steps, jumps, "skids" and pas de sha. The variation of the soloist in the pas de trois and the variations of Lucien are almost continuous flight without landings.

The composition of the soloists that the Parisians brought to Paquita are unequal, if only because

Matthias Eimann - Lucien's performer - exists in the world in a single copy.

All the other Luciens are good, but they fall short of Matthias. He made his debut in Paquita in December 2007 in all games at once. While his senior colleagues worked out their star status in the role of the premier, Eyman, who had just been elevated to the rank of the first dancer, jumped into the pas de trois and saluted in the Spanish dance, paralleling Lucien's flights in the repzal.

And when he came out in the lead role as a replacement - a boy with a pronounced Arabic note in his features and an absolutely incredible effortless jump - the name of the future etalia was unequivocally determined (then, however, there was no vacancy for a long time, and the appointment had to wait at least a year).

Eyman instituted a completely different manner of dancing and manner of behavior on stage - intrepid, a little arrogant, a little insensitive, but extremely interesting and innovative.

Today, this is a venerable prime minister, whose performances are watched by Paris, and whom Muscovites passionately fell in love with. He was not shown on the last tour, referring to the artist's employment in the current repertoire of the opera, thereby exacerbating the shock of the opening. Florian Magnenet, the second Lucien, is not inferior to Eyman in gallant manners, but the Lacotte variations are not yet up to him.

On the first evening, Paquita was danced by Lyudmila Pagliero, the main virtuoso of the Paris Opera.

Etoile is beautiful, enduring, with a good jump, brilliant spin and an extraordinary sense of adagio.

Like any hostage of technology, Lyudmila has a certain dramatic stamping, but not critical.

Another Paquita - Alice Renavan. She is also hardy, also with a jump, but for classical ballet she is too exotic. Renavan has stagnated in supporting roles, which she often performs brighter than other prima title roles, but the mentality of a good adjutant prevents her from becoming a general.

However, the beauty Alice has every chance to soon become an etiquette for achievements in modern dance - in this area she is unrivaled.

In addition to the delights of the étoile dance, the French gave the joy of neat fifth positions, restrained manners and the elegance of each artist individually.

Photo by D. Yusupov