Color Revolution At The Bolshoi

Color Revolution At The Bolshoi
Color Revolution At The Bolshoi

Video: Color Revolution At The Bolshoi

Video: Color Revolution At The Bolshoi
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The first production of the ballet "The Flames of Paris", created by librettist Nikolai Volkov, artist Vladimir Dmitriev, composer Boris Asafiev, choreographer Vasily Vainonen and director Sergei Radlov based on the novel by Provençal Felix Gras "The Marseilles" in the early thirties of the last century32 took place in the early thirties of the last century32 Leningrad, at the Theater of Opera and Ballet. SM Kirov, and was timed to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the October Revolution. The further stage fate of this ballet was, one might say, more than successful: in 1933 it was transferred from Leningrad to Moscow, namely, to the Bolshoi Theater, where it remained in the repertoire until 1964 and was staged more than a hundred times; It is also known that Joseph Stalin liked this ballet very much (according to the recollections of the choreographer Vasily Vainonen's son Nikita, the “father of peoples” attended this performance almost 15 times), he liked it so much that he was even awarded a prize in his name.

In 2004, Alexei Ratmansky, who had just assumed the post of artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, announced his intention to resurrect the forgotten ideological masterpiece and again include "The Flames of Paris" in the repertoire of the country's main theater. However, he was able to carry out his intention only in 2008 - then in July the premiere of a new version of the play took place (it was impossible to reconstruct the original choreography of Vasily Vainonen, since no materials about the production of the 1950s-1960s, except for a twenty-minute newsreel, were preserved; it was decided to rewrite the libretto, in order to get away from ideological unambiguity - Alexei Ratmansky and Alexander Belinsky took up the adaptation of the work to modern realities, as a result, four acts turned into two).

Personally, it is not entirely clear to me why it was necessary to revive this ballet, or rather, what prompted Alexei Ratmansky, "an ironic intellectual and a master of psychological details," as Tatyana Kuznetsova called him in the article "Counter-revolution of the Great Style" (Vlast magazine, No. 25 (778) of June 30, 2008), to attend to the recreation of a long-forgotten production, moreover, to put it mildly, ideologically outdated. Perhaps the whole thing is in the music - it is really very good, and perhaps in the "archaeological" excitement that gripped the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet. I do not know. But judging by the result, the game was worth the candle. "The Flame of Paris" - as reworked by Alexei Ratmansky - is something, in a good way, of course. And the performance was so successful, not least thanks to the brilliant work of set designers Ilya Utkin and Yevgeny Monakhov and costume designer Elena Markovskaya. By the way, these three collaborate with Alexei Ratmansky far from the first time - they made sets and costumes for two more productions of Ratmansky, namely, for the ballet "The Bright Stream" to music by Dmitry Shostakovich (Riga, National Opera House, 2004) and to the ballet Cinderella to music by Sergei Prokofiev (St. Petersburg, Mariinsky Theater, 2002).

The artistic solution of these productions, as well as of the ballet "The Flames of Paris", is emphasized architecturally and resembles the "paper" graphics of the same Ilya Utkin of the eighties.

As a prototype of the crooked structures knocked together from numerous slats in one of the scenes of the "Bright Stream", the project "Wooden Skyscraper" by Ilya Utkin and Alexander Brodsky in 1988 is unmistakably guessed.

A hefty metal hoop, painted black and suspended by cables between two similar black pillars in Cinderella, which periodically rotates in a vertical plane around its diametrical axis and, thus, is perceived by viewers as either a chandelier or a clock (the hoop, being in the position when its plane is perpendicular to the surface of the stage, against the background of a backlit that is either bright red or faded blue, it looks like some kind of alchemical drawing) - like an enlarged fragment of the patterned glass vault of the Museum of Architecture and Art, designed by Ilya Utkin together with Alexander Brodsky in 1988.

But "The Flame of Paris", I think, is the best that Ilya Utkin and Evgeny Monakhov have created as set designers, and at the same time, it is probably the best work of Elena Markovskaya as a costume designer to date. Labor that Elena Markovskaya spent on creating sketches of costumes for this production and without exaggeration can be called titanic at all - she came up with more than 300 costumes, all are as authentic as possible, and even quite beautiful in addition.

The Flames of Paris ballet is designed much more succinctly than The Bright Stream and Cinderella: there are relatively few rigid sets for a production of this scale, and they play, as it seems to me, a secondary role in the formation of the stage space; the main "attraction" here are, oddly enough, the backdrops - huge printouts of scanned graphic drawings by Ilya Utkin, depicting architectural objects somewhat similar to the so-called "architectural bodies" by Etienne Louis Bull, various public spaces of Paris (Champ de Mars, Place des Vosges), which, however, are far from immediately recognizable due to the conventionality of the drawings themselves, the majestic interiors of the palaces. Of all the types of scenery used in the production, it is the backdrops with black-and-white pencil drawings of Paris printed on them, made as if "from memory", slightly distorting reality, the true appearance of the French capital, resembling, in their dryness and emphasized schematicity, the French engravings of the late 18th - early 19th century XIX century, set the mood for the performance.

As you know, engravings are the most authentic source of visual information about the realities of the French Revolution. Therefore, it is quite logical that the set designers "immersed" real actors in the space of the engraving. Thus, they achieve the necessary measure of convention - after all, there was a revolution 200 years ago. But the flip side of convention is historical truth - after all, none of our contemporaries could see the real French revolution, and engravings, if desired, can be seen by everyone. It turns out that graphics in this case are more real than naturalism.

Tellingly, among the sketched architecture of the performance there is only one naturalistic element - the scenery of the Versailles play about Rinaldo and Armida, built into the main plot. Which is also logical: the performance within the performance turns out to be more material than the Parisian life of two hundred years ago; the contrast only emphasizes the graphic nature of the main part of the scenery.

By the way, in the way Ilya Utkin and Evgeny Monakhov portrayed Paris, there is an analogy with Federico Fellini's film "Casanova", where Venice, Paris and Dresden are also shown very conditionally (the great director, in this case, preferred grotesque scenery to nature shooting - for example, the real sea was replaced there with cellophane) - both for the set designers of "The Flame of Paris" and for the director of "Casanova" the fundamental moment was to get away from authenticity. Paris in Ratmansky's play turned out to be a kind of ghostly, semi-fantastic city, gray, with parks covered with fog and skies covered with cannon smoke, a city that seems to be so familiar, but at the same time completely unrecognizable.

The sets by Ilya Utkin and Yevgeny Monakhov are remarkable not only for the fact that they create a unique atmosphere - they also very accurately reflect the plot dynamics of the ballet. Each set is emotionally consistent with the action unfolding against its background.

At the beginning of the first act, we observe how indignation boils among the people caused by the atrocities committed by the nobility (the marquis harasses the peasant Jeanne - her brother Jerome, seeing all this, stands up for his sister - he is beaten and thrown into prison), but he is destined to grow into an uprising only in the second act, for the time being, "evil" remains unpunished - the gloomy and cold scenery of the forest and prison makes a depressing impression, they suppress, the commoners, dressed in colored clothes, look like lost against their background (in this contrast, black white decorations and colored costumes - a special chic of the production), "Leviathan", the state colossus embodied in the frightening image of the Marquis's castle (a giant cylindrical volume made of bricks), while triumphant, revolutionary moods are only brewing. Gradually, the background from black and white turns to color: the halls of the Palace of Versailles are painted now blue, now gold, the sky clouded with black clouds over the Champ de Mars acquires an orange hue - the monarchy is about to be overthrown and power will pass to the Convention. Towards the end, color almost completely displaces black and white graphics from backdrops. The people are conducting a "righteous" trial of the aristocrats, their heads are cut off on the guillotines - in the episode of the assault on the Tuileries, the backdrop itself looks like a huge guillotine blade: a rectangular canvas is replaced by a triangular one with a façade drawn on it, which hangs threateningly over the stage - behind the façade- the blades stretch the screen, illuminated by a blood-red light. At some point, most of the light goes out and it becomes so dark on the stage that only the red wedge of the screen and the revolutionaries raging against its background are distinguishable. Pretty scary in general. This episode brings to mind El Lissitzky's avant-garde poster "Hit the Whites with a Red Wedge." If Ilya Utkin and Yevgeny Monakhov, when thinking about the design of the storming episode, also recalled Lissitzky's "Red Wedge", then the whole performance, if we abstract from the storyline, can be considered as a subtle metaphor for the change of cultural paradigms at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, the death of canonical art and the birth of avant-garde art. Even if we forget about Lissitzky, there is definitely a certain symbolism in the artistic solution of the ballet: the classical, symmetrical, black-and-white world collapses, or rather, it is destroyed by a crowd of ragamuffins, and only bloody scraps remain of it, together forming a semblance of an avant-garde composition - chaos triumphs over harmony …

It is impossible not to mention those scenery for the performance, which remained only in the sketches and in the model. The decoration of the episode of the assault on the Tuileries should have been brighter, more colorful, it should have been more aggressive: Ilya Utkin and Yevgeny Monakhov thought to add at least four more of the same "cutting through the air" over the heads of the rebels to the blade-facade overhanging the stage, and the blood-red light was supposed to flood everything that was possible. In addition, as conceived by the production designers, in the final of the performance, the jubilant crowd of revolutionaries had to, in parallel with the performance of various dance numbers, in real time assemble a sculpture of the "supreme being" similar to a sphinx from pre-prepared components. Obviously, the set designers wanted thereby to hint at the pagan nature of any revolutionary action, they say, some strange, eerie-looking god comes to replace God's anointed one.

However, Alexei Ratmansky refused both the blades and the assembly of the "supreme being", motivating this, according to Ilya Utkin, by the fact that these two artistic images express what he, Ratmansky, wanted to express with a dance. Well, if this is true, then this is another confirmation that Ilya Utkin and Evgeny Monakhov did everything as it should.

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