Not really a vintage Mariinsky season — an odd choice of repertoire and some hit-and-miss male casting — but the Covent Garden run ended on a glorious high.
Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère is a lightly curried love triangle about a handsome warrior torn between his betrothed (a Rajah’s daughter) and a beautiful temple dancer. Old-fashioned? You bet. But the scenery is chewed with such relish and the choreo-graphy delivered with such radiant commitment that the three hours roll by in a lime-lit haze — you half expect an audience in dress uniforms and tiaras.
The scenery, a pick-and-mix from the 1877 premiere and the 1900 revival, adds to the sense of time travel with a Rousseau-esque sacred forest for Act One and a masterclass in two-point perspective from Matvei Shishkov for the Rajah’s palace.
The Royal Ballet’s Bayadère makes do with fewer servants than Downton Abbey but Petipa’s ballet à grand spectacle was conceived and staged with orientalist largesse.
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