Tradition is often frowned on. Yet, if properly handled, it can be sheer fun and pure bliss, as demonstrated by the Bolshoi Ballet’s current season in London. Far from being museum pieces, the classics so far presented stand out for their vibrant and captivating theatricality. According to an enlightening note by Yuri Grigorovich, the father of Russian contemporary ballet, much of it depends on an approach that favours performance tradition over sterile philology. In other words, care is taken to note the cuts, the interpolations, the revisions and the additions that have helped each ballet stand the test of time, instead of going for a much idealised ‘original’.
The outcome might occasionally look odd to audiences used to the trendy rediscoveries and reconstructions of long-lost originals. But balletic oddity is central to the fun; geographical and cultural incongruities are integral to the choreographic 19th-century Orientalism that a ballet such as La Bayadère (1877) relies on.
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