THE Kirov Ballet’s restaging of the original Sleeping Beauty was such a hit with London audiences several years ago that it was inevitable the Russians would be back with another reconstruction. As ballet lovers, we are a nation with a taste for history so the chances are that we would welcome a re-creation of the 1900 St Petersburg staging of La Bayadère, all four acts — and four hours — of it.
Thanks to regular visits by the Kirov, and Natalia Makarova’s production at Covent Garden (where it opens the Royal Ballet season in October), Petipa’s Indian melodrama of jealousy and revenge is as familiar as an old friend. But what we haven’t seen before is the unexpurgated Bayadère.
Sergei Vikharev has used notated choreographic texts to remount Bayadère as it was at the Maryinsky Theatre in 1900. This has meant reinstating the fourth act (it was dropped in the 1920s), reordering the choreography to take it back 100 years and restoring what seem like acres of mime.
The pace is slow, much slower than modern audiences are used to. You have to accept that all the elements — mime, spectacle and choreography — are equal partners. Indeed, the ballet’s first half is so mime heavy (how wonderful to follow the story so closely) that you start to wonder when the dance will kick in. But stick around, plant your sensibility in a fragrant cloud of 19th-century nostalgia and enjoy the procession of Petipa’s lavish panorama. No, it’s not the transcendent magic we experienced with Sleeping Beauty, but this is a lurid little tale and Minkus is no Tchaikovsky.
The sets, now complete with fourth act and apotheosis, evoke an exotic Indian fantasy where palace architecture nestles amid palm trees and the ghostly bayadères emerge through Himalayan boulders. The razzmatazz costumes are a circus of colour and pattern, reds and yellows parched by the sun, the women with trousered legs and bare midriffs. There are parrots, an elephant, a cast of 100 and the asp who sends Nikiya to an early death.
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Quibbles. Is the mime as clear as it could be? The children (recruited locally) are under-rehearsed. The tiger looks more like road kill than a hunting trophy. The women’s pointe shoes make too much noise. And there is no excuse for three 25-minute intervals.
On opening night Daria Pavlenko was Nikiya, the temple dancer (the bayadère of the title) who is betrayed by her lover and dispatched by her aristocratic rival. Pavlenko’s dancing is lovely, even if her Kingdom of the Shades didn’t quite scale the heights of Petipa’s shimmering classicism.
Although she has plenty of emoting to do before then, Elvira Tarasova’s murderous Gamzatti doesn’t dance a step until Act IV and when it came she showed the strain on Thursday. Solor has even less in the way of choreography, but Andrian Fadeyev’s handsome warrior nobleman made the most of his few minutes in the air after an evening spent trying to keep two beautiful women happy. Vladimir Ponomarev (the Kirov’s majestic character actor) is a fierce High Brahmin, a man you wouldn’t want to cross. And the corps de ballet, the real stars of this company, deserved their prolonged Shades ovation.
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