"The Firebird"
Russian fairytale in two scenes
Music: Igor Stravinsky
Choreography: Michel Fokine (1910)
Libretto: Michel Fokine
Reconstruction: Isabelle Fokine, Andris Liepa
Set and costume design: Anna and Anatoly Nezhny
after original sketches: Alexander Golovin, Leon Bakst and Michel Fokine
World premiere: 25 June 1910, Les Ballets Russes de Serge de Diaghilev, Theatre de l?Opera, Paris
In the repertoire of the Mariinsky Theatre since May 26, 1994
Running time: 50 minutes
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
I have staged many ballets, but neither with Stravinsky nor with any other composer have I worked so hand-in-glove as on this occasion. (...) I wasn't expecting the composer to bring me the completed music. Stravinsky came to me with the initial sketches and basic ideas. He performed them for me. I mimed the scenes for him. At my request he broke up his own and the folk themes into short musical phrases, in accordance with individual moments of the scene, individual gestures and poses. I remember how he brought me the beautiful Russian melody for the entrance of Ivan Tsarevich and how I asked him not to have the entire melody at once, but when Ivan appears at the wall, when he gazes upon the wonders of the magic garden, when he jumps down from the wall... just a hint at the theme, some individual notes. Stravinsky played it. I depicted the Tsarevich. The piano acted as my wall. I leaped over the piano, jumped off it, strolled about, anxiously looking around my study... Stravinsky followed me and repeated to me fragments of the Tsarevich's melody to a background of quivering dance reflecting the garden of the evil King Kashchei. Then I was a tsarevna, I timidly accepted a golden apple from the imaginary tsarevich's hands. Then I was Kashchei, his infernal retinue and so on and so forth. All of this was very picturesquely reflected in the sounds of the piano being performed by the fingers of Stravinsky, who was also absorbed by this interesting work. (...)
The ballet The Firebird is dear to me not just because the music was written to my plot and that it was an exceptional success and remained in the repertoire of Diaghilev's company as long as it existed. But most of all because it embodied my ideal of combining a choreographic work with a musical opus, and it is also dear to me for the memories of those anxieties and joys that the composer and I felt together. (...)
When staging the dances I used three principles that are utterly different in terms of character and technique in this ballet.
I created the evil kingdom using grotesque, angular and sometimes freakish and sometimes amusing movements. The monsters moved on all fours, jumped like frogs, did different "tricks" with their legs, sitting and lying on the stage, their hands like fish fins, at times under the elbows, at times under the ears, the arms were entwined, they moved from one side to the other, squatting and so on, in a word they did everything that twenty years later began to be known as modern dance and what at the time seemed to me to be the most suitable means of expressing a nightmare, horror and ugliness. Virtuoso leaps and frivolity were also used.
The Tsarevnas danced with bare feet. They were natural, gracious and soft movements with a certain nuance of Russian folk dance.
I constructed the theme of the Firebird herself en pointe and on leaps, more so on the leaps. The dances are virtuoso, albeit without entrechats, battements, ronds de jambe, of course without turn-out or any preparations whatsoever. The arms at times flew out like wings, at others they held the body and the head in defiance of all ballet positions. In the ornamentation of the Firebird's arms, as in the movements of Kashchei's minions, there was a certain element of the Orient. (...)
To express the plot I absolutely rejected the conditional speech of the arms and ballet gestures, and I expressed it through the action and the dances.
Michel Fokine. Extracts from the book Against the Current
"Les Noces"
Russian choreographic scenes with singing and music to folk text from the Kireyevsky Collection
Scene plan, music and text: Igor Stravinsky (1923)
Choreography: Bronislava Nijinska (1923)
Decor and Costumes: Natalia Goncharova (1923)
Musical Director and Conductor: Valery Gergiev
Staged: Howard Sayette
Decor reproduced: Boris Kaminsky
Costumes reproduced: Tatiana Noginova
Lighting: Vladimir Lukin
World premiere: 13 June 1923, Ballet Russe de Serge de Diaghilev, Theatre de la Gaiete-Lyrique, Paris
Premiere at the Mariinsky Theatre: 9 June 2003
Running time: 20 minutes
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
For over ten years Stravinsky was consumed with the idea of Les Noces, a choral work as "a sequence of typical wedding episodes, a reproduction from fragments typical of this ceremony of conversations." The composer sought out the musical form, the orchestral ensemble and the traditional folkloric text, which would represent a genuine Russian rite, and not describe a wedding plot in an a la rus stylisation.
Stravinsky's proposed "idea of ritual and impersonal action" found its dazzling embodiment in the choreography of Bronislava Nijinska. It was to her, a classical dancer who had once been a worthy partner and co-conspirator of her brother Vaslav, and who in the post-revolutionary years had dedicated herself to seeking out a new movement, that Diaghilev entrusted the staging of this work that was so precious to him. And, as usual, he had not miscalculated. The Paris premiere of Les Noces in 1923 emerged as a forum, and it revealed to the world a choreographer for whom this production alone would have been enough to ensure entry to the pantheon of great 20th century choreographers.
Responding to the nuances of the capricious rhythms and metrics of the music, in Les Noces the movement spoke and lived, needing no pantomime, stage props and realistic costumes. A dance of the ensemble. In the choreographer's mind, each dancer was to blend with the whole through the movement. The Bride and the Groom are mere parts of the combined ensemble, which conveyed the dramatic character of fate and the perpetuity of the protagonists in an old-style peasant wedding: just like in the maiden's braids, which before the wedding are unplaited into two parts and redressed in a woman's hairstyle, the maidens leaned their heads on each other's shoulders, bowing in ritual lamentation, leaned their heads as on an executioner's block. The extreme minimalism in subordination to the dance in the rather cool geometry of the choreographic drawing, in the insistent repetition of the monotonous movements, in the simplicity of the bicoloured brown and white costumes conceived by Natalia Goncharova and in the intentional impassivity of the performers – everything in the ballet was of its time in the context of the avant-garde of the 1920s. And in the sharp, contemporary nature of the ballet the primordial Russian nature of Les Noces was not lost – not cheaply popular and souvenir-like, but conditionally ritualistic, where the plot unfolds as if in a clockwork mechanism: the figures of the dancers intermingle monotonously, literally submitting to the will of one master, the ancient and immutable ritual.
Olga Makarova
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