Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Yesterday’s morning name, for a ballet. From Wikipedia:

La Bayadère (en. The Temple Dancer) … is a ballet, originally staged in four acts and seven tableaux by French choreographer Marius Petipa to the music of Ludwig Minkus. La Bayadère was first performed by the Imperial Ballet at the Imperial Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, on 4 February [O.S. 23 January] 1877. A scene from the ballet, known as The Kingdom of the Shades, is one of the most celebrated excerpts in all of classical ballet.

Today, La Bayadère is presented primarily in two different versions — those productions derived from Vakhtang Chabukiani and Vladimir Ponomaryov’s 1941 revival for the Kirov Ballet, and those productions derived from Natalia Makarova’s 1980 version for American Ballet Theatre, which is itself derived from Chabukiani and Ponomaryov’s version.

… Petipa’s La Bayadère … tells the story of the bayadère Nikiya and the warrior Solor, who have sworn eternal fidelity to one another.

Very brief excerpts from a Bolshoi performance here:

This entry was posted on June 23, 2015 at 6:08 am and is filed under Art/lit/music/film, Dance, Names. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.