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For years now Don Quixote was little known in the west outside of this, the Grand Pas de Deux, the climaxes, the ballet.
The current visibility of this distinctly Spanish spectacle with its chivalrous conquistadors,
spirited señoritas,
and Hispanic bravado is entirely due to a change in national policy in its country of origin, the Soviet Union.
The October Revolution of 1917 spread terror and bloodshed across Russia.
In its wake Nicholas Sergeyev fled to the west.
He could only take what was essential, food, clothing, and the choreography to the classic ballets.
A few years later, thanks to Sergeyev, western audiences got to see the full length version of Don Quixote for the first time.
It was not what they expected. Some in fact have been unsettled by it ever since.
I feel that the story line is too slim when you think of what it's based on with the Cervantes tale.
I think it's too loosely an excuse for good dancing.
And I think that there's an element of sarcasm and nastiness and superficiality in the characterizations.
No matter how much you want to bring them a depth and an intensity, it's very hard to do.
I had a hard time with Don Quixote because I think it was such a sort of superficial piece.
I found it hard to find a character in that ballet, to find things, nothing that I could hang on to and grow into.
In choreographer Marius Petipas' defense, Don Quixote is not the easiest book in the world to adapt to ballet.
The biggest hurdle is the title character, Cervantes' senile knight.
Considering that it's called Don Quixote and you expect Don Quixote to be the leading character, and in fact he's sort of a sideline,
he can play a very important part in the heart and spirit of Cervantes of this.
Not necessarily whacked out guy who's lost his brains, but believes he's on a noble mission.
However misguided it is, he's on a noble mission, which is a good foundation for a ballet.
Fair enough, but that presents another obstacle.
You have a problem with Don Quixote of a ballet whose putative hero is a rather old man.
Now rather old men don't dance ballet very well, so in effect what has been done traditionally is to turn the Don into a witness to the dancing,
more than as the propagator of the plot.
So you're left with a central character who can't express himself through soaring leaps or daring jetés.
That requires the services of an actor, and in ballet a performer who acts more than he arabesques is called a character dancer.
A character dancer is usually that actor dancer that helps tell the story,
but you know everybody in a ballet company is an embryo character dancer because we are always something we are not.
Even if you're in the court of ballet, you're not really a swan.
So that becomes characterization, and that's where it all starts and then it just broadens out.
The character dancers are the storytellers.
We have to rely on mime, we have to rely on our faces, we have to rely on reactions.
And if you think that sounds like a lot less fun than being a principal dancer, think again.
The thing about being a character dancer, and this is what you cannot do in ensemble work,
is that you can do it just a little bit differently every night.
You have this wonderful open field, and you can change the direction that you look,
or you can change the way you're thinking, or you can change how you look,
because you do go home with these things and you do think about them.
Character dancing is usually the domain of people like this.
Cagy old veterans whose handsome young prince roles are behind them, but very few young dancers take on character roles.
Because our careers are limited by time, unlike an actor's, we tend to protect that period
when we are at our top classical form by in fact refusing to contemplate roles
that are usually given to older people or people who do not dance all the time.
And that's what frightens us as dancers. Is it over for me?
Because we're always frightened about them. When is it going to be over?
When are they going to say, someone come backstage and say,
that's wonderful, but you should be doing the role of the old man.
But that doesn't mean that character dancers are performers that are all washed up.
Nice to be able to challenge dancers where they're at a point in their life,
because there's a stigma in the dance hierarchy that you go from core to soloist to principal to leading dancer,
and then once you're through with all that, you do the character roles.
It's nice to engage thinking artists that see that that is an augment
in the same way that doing a contemporary ballet, even though they're basically classically trained dancers,
an augment and a system of growth for them.
Besides, whatever choreographic shortcomings there are in the role of Don Quixote,
they are more than made up for in the other central male role,
that of Don Quixote's young friend, the barber, Basilio.
Basil, aside from being a very buoyant and exciting and happy role and flirtations and all those qualities,
is a technically demanding role.
You talk about power.
There is a role also like Solor in La Valla there, like Raimonda.
It's flashy and powerful.
It's once again a role where buoyant, fresh, young spirit is needed.
It's the role of Basil, it's like a little red ruby shining constantly.
It should never, the light should never disappear.
It should always be bubbling and shiny.
It was great fun.
You know, there was no psychological depths that I could find in this barber.
So it was just a role.
Another problem with adapting the book Don Quixote to ballet is its episodic and often philosophical nature.
But Petipa got around that one easily enough.
He simply retained the exotic locale and the central characters
and replaced them with two hours of nonstop pyrotechnics.
Boy, they would have loved him in Hollywood.
What's left is an errant knight who, dreaming of chivalry, is destroyed by his own pursuits.
Don Quixote is also involved in the complicated union of an innkeeper's daughter, Kietri,
and the barber, Basilio, and their plan to flee Barcelona.
If you feel that that's a sense of betrayal of Cervantes, I would be in your camp.
However, strangely enough, it does work as light entertainment,
and it works very well as sort of an exhibition of bravura dancing.
That has never been denied.
It dances, dances, dances, and never stops dancing.
Of course, given the story's Spanish setting, what could one expect?
I must say that the actual Latin side to myself helped me immensely
interpreting the roles that needed that Latin flair.
It's exhausting.
You finish the first act only, and you feel like you have no energy left
because when you're not dancing, you have to be ready to dance.
You feel like you have no energy left because when you're not dancing,
you have to be with full energy because that's the Spanish temperament.
So even if you're not doing the steps but you're on the stage, you have to be full energy.
You can't be a little relaxed here or there.
You have to be full energy all the time.
The Spanish flair and fire is no doubt what attracted Petipa to the property
in the first place, and it's attracted just about every dancer since.
I used to enjoy doing Don Quijote.
You get better reception this way.
I enjoy temperament in dancing.
I enjoy dancing.
I enjoy dancing.
I like dancing.
I like dancing.
I like dancing.
I like dancing.
I like dancing.
I like dancing.
I like dancing.
I enjoy temperament in dancing.
I enjoy other people with temperament, and I enjoy having roles that have temperament,
you know, a bit of fire, a bit of, you know, sauciness,
and that role allowed that kind of slightly over-the-top sauciness that was fun to do.
Ordinarily, this type of dancing isn't that much of a poser for a dancer,
but in Don Quijote, there's an added twist.
Petipa's choreography isn't entirely faithful to the idiom,
like my segment off the top of the show.
It's more like broken Spanish.
It's a special style.
It's Petipa's style with Spanish style, classical Spanish dance.
What Monique is alluding to is Petipa's ability to import a Spanish style over the classical form.
Kimberley will demonstrate some steps from her third act solo in a purely classical way.
These same steps now with a Spanish style.
And you have to be sure-footed from the word go.
Don Quijote is not the kind of ballet you wade into.
It's the kind of ballet you jump into with both feet.
Suddenly, you jump into the role with the most difficult technical steps,
and the variation is very long in his ballet.
Thank you.
Three acts are very different because in the first act, you have to act a lot.
You have to play, it's a little bit of humor scenes.
You have to dance a lot of variation, but it's to play.
In the second act, it's so different.
It's what is the imagination of Don Quijote.
So you have to be, like in the second act of Gisele, immaterial.
In the third act, you are a woman.
It's the wedding, and it's a serious part with a lot of technique,
but it's always Spanish style.
I found that it wasn't so much about the style,
it was about channeling your energy in a certain direction.
But in the end, I found the biggest challenge was to put yourself into a character
that the energy was so high and so macho,
without at nary a second going by with a little chink in the armor.
The construction is very rigorous, not only because everybody has to dance,
but also because the dancers need to breathe.
Therefore, the construction is done in order to have a pas de quatre,
a pas de trois, a variation, and a dodge, and you breathe, and you start again.
If there's a consolation to having to put your body through two and a half hours of solid dancing,
it's that in a ballet of such duration and of so many highlights,
it's easier to get away with mistakes.
I often tell the dancers a three-act ballet is an ensemble.
Even if you miss something in an act, a variation or a little something in an adage,
it doesn't matter because there's three acts and the public has forgotten the moment you've missed,
because there's so many other things during these two hours.
You've been the character, that you've been technically good,
and that there's no need to be obsessive only about the technique.
That's the advantage of ballets which have a storyline.
But the best part of this ballet is still the excerpt that made it to the West
long before the rest came along, the grand pas de deux.
When you do it by itself, sometimes in gals and things like that,
it's a different feeling because it's not the whole ballet, it's just pas de deux.
So you have to even put more of the style in it because you don't have the scenery,
you don't have anything, so you have to make it the right styles.
All of Don Quixote's bravado and fireiness is concentrated into this single dance.
Dancers love its playful sexuality, a rare quality in the stately world of ballet.
I just love the whole thing with the fan and the shoulders and the exuberance of it
and the dash and spark and vivacity of that pas de deux solo.
Wonderful solo with all the ending on points. Absolutely wonderful.
They say that the measure of a great actor is his ability to wring emotion
from reading the telephone book.
I mean a good actor, not the one we could afford.
But in the same vein, the ballet version of Don Quixote is a testament
not to the genius of Cervantes, but to that of Marius Petipa,
who proves that he can create great dance out of the most unlikely of properties.
Don Quixote's bravado and fireiness is concentrated into this single dance.
Don Quixote's bravado
Don Quixote's bravado
Don Quixote
Don Quixote
Don Quixote
Don Quixote
Don Quixote
Don Quixote
Don Quixote
Don Quixote
Don Quixote
Don Quixote
Don Quixote
Don Quixote
Don Quixote
This may be impossible, but let's try to settle the argument
about just how great Marius Petipa was.
He was a choreographer of classics like La Bayadere,
the ever popular and renowned Swan Lake,
and the lavish grand fairy tale, The Sleeping Beauty, amongst many others.
Petipa developed a style that while graceful and elegant, lacked imagination.
So much so that his ballets were virtually forgotten by the time of his death.
But just a few years later, his ballets were rediscovered,
and dancers began to appreciate just how advanced his pet steps were.
Nowadays, our dancers today are technically so able that it's incredible.
I mean, there isn't anything they can't do.
I mean, they're almost like acrobats.
But how on earth that choreography could have been done years ago in Petipa's time,
I don't think the dancers were good enough technically to do it then.
It's so technically, physically exacting and unfairly demanding.
And you say, can dancers really have danced this a hundred years ago?
But there is a uniformity and a continuity in those steps from Swan Lake
and those steps from Sleeping Beauty and those steps from Bayadere
that suggests that they were demanded of those dancers.
And the genius of Petipa is that they are difficult a hundred years later.
Our technical standards have raised.
We have physical abilities in the Olympics and in athletics
that are far surpassed even 50 years ago.
And yet, any classical dancer will tell you that there is nothing more difficult
than ballets such as La Bayadere.
Looking back, it's hard to believe that this hugely important figure
was obscured by his brother Lucien, a dancer with the Paris Opera.
Lucien and Marius were born into a dance family.
Their father, Jean, was a ballet master from whom the boys took lessons.
At the age of 16, Marius left home to dance
and staged ballets of his own in Bordeaux and Madrid.
By the time he was 30, he was back in Paris, penniless and on the streets.
Then came an invitation to the Imperial Theatre in St. Petersburg,
but only because his father, now a professor at the Imperial School,
pulled some strings.
In Russia, Petipa found himself dancing more than creating.
Incredibly, he wasn't invited to choreograph in any significant way
until 14 years later.
But once given the opportunity, he made up for lost time.
Over the course of the next 40 years, Marius Petipa would create
over 60 ballets, including a handful that would stand up
more than admirably against the telltale test of time.
Which of Petipa's many ballets is his greatest
is the subject of much debate?
Gentlemen?
Well, Swan Lake, without question.
I disagree. There's no moment in Swan Lake like the Rosadage
and the Sleeping Beauty. Sleeping Beauty gets my vote.
Well, are we talking about aesthetics
or are we talking about audience appeal?
Because if we're talking about audience appeal,
it's got to be the Nutcracker.
Well, if Petipa has a masterpiece, it may very well be La Bayadere.
Oh, the Bayadere, of course. Oh, please.
I don't know anyone that doesn't see Bayadere for the first time,
and is not struck by the beauty, by the simplicity,
the classicism of that ballet.
La Bayadere is the story of a warrior, Solor,
who is in love with a Bayadere, an Indian temple dancer.
But Solor is offered the hand of the Raja's daughter
and is unable to refuse.
The daughter, Gamsati, learns of Solor's affection for the Bayadere.
She sends the Bayadere a basket containing a poisonous snake.
The snake bites the Bayadere, and she dies.
In a dream, Solor follows the Bayadere to the Kingdom of the Shades,
where he asks for her forgiveness.
Very, very hard ballet to perform from the technical standpoint.
It's also a great dramatic challenge because it's a huge ballet
with a lot of different, a lot of plot to get through
and a lot of different moods to bring across to the audience,
and it's just epic in every sense.
In fact, when La Bayadere premiered in 1877,
the Russian critics awarded it four czars.
La Bayadere is textbook Petipa.
The components of his unmistakable style are all over it.
Petipa had a genius for getting the most out of a minimal amount of steps.
This is more evident in La Bayadere than in any of his other ballets.
All through the course of this ballet, Petipa recycles the same basic dance vocabulary.
They're the same basic steps his father taught at the Imperial Ballet School,
steps that go back, in fact, to ballet's earliest years.
Formative dance instruction, such as the kind taught in ballet companies around the world,
just began here at the Paris Opera, where the reigning monarch Louis XIV
established the world's first dance academy.
It was entrusted to his friend and dance instructor, Pierre Beauchamp.
Beauchamp got the ball rolling by defining the five positions of the feet.
These five positions are the clay from which all other dance moves are made.
Now, when Petipa became a choreographer, he built on this.
The five basic positions of the feet are like five musical notes.
Now, you can play with those five notes all you want.
But you'll only get so many results.
What Petipa did is he embellished the five basic steps of dance
with techniques he had seen performed by traveling troops of Italian dancers.
In other words, Petipa added all of the notes in between.
This established a wider dance vocabulary from which he would create
some of the world's greatest and most musical ballets.
He made what appears to be a very economical choreography,
very simple, but it is treacherous.
It is technically terribly difficult.
It is treacherous. It is technically terribly difficult.
Another facet of Petipa's genius is his work with the corps de ballet.
While most choreographers of the time were content
to have the corps simply frame the action,
Petipa was the first artist to fully integrate the corps into the ballet.
The corps would take on an immense stature in his later creations,
like the Nutcracker, but the precedent was set in La Bayadère.
Act II, a dream sequence known as the Kingdom of the Shades,
is a stunning vehicle for the corps.
The Shades scene, the whole second act, is a beautiful act.
It can be sort of mesmerizing, and you just sit there,
just hypnotized by these beautiful corps dancers.
If they do it well, it can be fantastic.
For the audience, the intricate patterns of the corps,
whether in motion or in repose, create a hypnotic illusion.
When I began to understand the entire context of that excerpt
was that it was supposed to be an opium dream.
Then I understood the choreography and how it made your eyes,
it made you kind of feel like you were on a trip somewhere,
the way the girls cross, the way the formations play tricks with your eyes.
But for the corps de ballet, the Kingdom of the Shades act
is more like a nightmare than a dream.
I think that for a corps de ballet, it has to be just a nightmare.
In a poor corps de ballet, they're beautifully dressed
in spotless white tutus, veils, and they look lovely.
But the poor things, they have to come down.
I mean, if you're the audience, they come down,
they're very steep black ramps, which gradually are diagonal
and they gradually reach the ground, the stage level.
They start very high up, and they're painted black.
So it appears that they are coming out of the sky,
that they're not on Earth, they're not on the Earth at all.
But meanwhile, they have very strong white spotlights
right in their eyes and shining up these ramps.
And these poor girls have to come on,
and they balance in what we call an arabesque.
They take a pose on one leg, and then they take a backbend
with a weight on the other foot.
And they do this, I think it's something like 32 times
until all the girls are down on the ground level.
By this time, they're nervous wrecks already
because the balance is already unfocused
because of this white light that's been in their eyes
on a black surface that they can't see
where they're putting their foot because it's black.
Finally, they get onto terra firma,
and then Patti Par has given them
some extremely difficult choreography to do to begin with.
It's a corda ballet, and they have to keep strictly in line
with each other and keep the formations
really like a geometrical problem.
But then they are given these...
I mean, Patti Par was very cruel at this point.
Having gone through this torture of an entrance
that these girls have done, having gone through that torture,
they then have to do things like what we call a devlopée.
They stand on one leg, and the other leg
very slowly is raised, and they have to hold it.
And, you know, unless the dancers are geniuses
and are strong as horses, you can...
the audience can visibly see the supporting ankle
is just wobbling like this, and the poor kids, you know,
are just terrified, and the tension is really awful.
Petipa was also a master of the grand pas de deux.
In this same act, he creates that magic
with a chiffon scarf.
I remember, as a student, watching that,
I always thought it was the most beautiful part, anyway.
I don't know, and you'd think
it would be sort of superficial to try and add something,
but it was like their connection between them,
the guy holding the scarf,
and the girl holding the scarf,
and the girl holding the scarf,
and the girl holding the scarf,
and the guy holding the scarf on one end,
and it was like a connection between them
without actually touching each other.
It was just a very beautiful movement,
and it's great to try and perform it correctly.
Though La Bayadere can be described
as the best of Marius Petipa,
it also represents a radical departure.
For Petipa, the ballerina was the focal point of ballet,
but in La Bayadere, Petipa creates a male role
that is not only central, but unprecedented in its depth.
La Bayadere is a ballet that is very rare.
It's a work like Raymonda, also, too,
and I can only think of two or three
where the sole part of the role, the male part,
is as important, or perhaps even more important,
than the ballerinas.
Solor in La Bayadere is really, as his name is,
the sun, the center of everything,
and two main ballerinas go around him,
Nicchia and Gamsati.
If Solor is not well performed,
La Bayadere loses more than 50% of its impact.
It gives the opportunity for a male dancer
to highlight virtuosity,
to highlight classicism,
the beauty of body lines,
romanticism,
heroic temperament.
Ironically, the true essence of Marius Petipa
may be just as elusive as the shade from Act II.
Though Petipa kept his own idiosyncratic notes,
he lived in a time in which there was no recognized way
of notating choreography.
In La Bayadere,
La Bayadere is not only central,
but also important in its depth.
This is the recognized way of notating choreography,
which presents the question,
is this...
this?
I sort of sometimes think about if,
when we're rehearsing a Petipa ballet,
imagining him being in the room
creating the ballet on us at that time,
so that you're trying to think of how he must have worked
as a choreographer in a room with his dancers,
and it would have been, I'm sure,
very like the choreographers of today,
or at any time, really,
working with dancers, working out a step,
a series of steps in order to convey something.
Today's choreographers run less of a risk
of having their works lost.
Over the last couple of decades,
accurate methods of recording steps have been developed.
These include a form of notation called choreography.
Choreography is the study and recording of choreography.
So to define a choreologist's job,
a choreologist becomes a choreographer's scribe, basically.
Once they have recorded the material or the choreography,
it's then their responsibility to maintain the quality
and the integrity of the ballet
once the dancers also know their parts.
There are two systems of notation
by which choreologists record choreography.
These two languages, if you will, are Laban and Benesh.
With Laban notation, you record the material
as though you were observing it from above.
With Benesh notation, you record the choreography
as though you were observing it from behind,
and both methods use the musical stave.
The way the stave is used is similar to the way a musician uses it
in that you have bar lines with repeat signs,
you have the beginning of a bar,
and at the beginning you would have the bar, the time signature.
But the stave is used completely differently.
The importance of choreography's role
in helping to preserve ballets is obvious.
It would be like trying to bring a group of musicians together
who, say, had played in a symphony
and learnt their parts by heart, but nothing was ever written down.
A year later, you're expecting them to put it all back together,
and for it to sound exactly the way it did,
that just wouldn't happen.
But despite its evident value,
many dancers and choreographers still question the validity of choreography.
The danger is that in the accuracy of choreography,
the accuracy of writing it down, it can get dry.
I once had a talk with Anthony Tudor about his ballets,
and he talked about a version that was very meticulously recreated
from notation and film and so on, and he said,
they got the steps all right and the ballet all wrong.
People also ask, well, why do we need to have choreography
in this day and age of videotape?
Now, we're looking at the same tape.
I mean, you know that now when we have, in the legal process,
when we can show a tape of someone in the act of some kind of crime
or in the act of the police dealing with someone,
that two people can look at that tape and see totally different things.
So it is a tool, like other tools that need to be used judiciously.
No pun intended there.
And what we have that's much, much clearer is a systematic notation system
that really tells you more of the truth.
Now, what it can't give you is the style and background in the fullest sense.
It's a question, then, that may never be answered.
Is La Bayadere true petipa?
I've heard a thousand different Russians say,
I have the original version.
And sometimes at one point you look at it and say,
is it necessary to know the original version?
Maybe not.
One look at the man's work and it's obvious that even a modest percentage
of his genius is enough to carry an audience to incredible heights.
It was towards the end of his life that the debate about
Petipa's contribution to dance began.
Among audiences and artistic directors alike,
the great choreographer came to represent the old school.
His final ballets, in fact, were scorned and ridiculed.
When we look at Petipa's later career,
we have to remember that this is a man who was born in 1818.
The fact of the matter is he died in his nineties.
He was choreographing in his eighties.
So in a sense, he lived beyond his own time.
Because he was senior in position in the Imperial Russian ballet,
he had authority and he was expected to do the big projects.
But eventually time began to tick against him.
And I think that it was fashion.
Of course, also you have to bear in mind that it was a question of resources, too.
The last days of the Romanovs were not perhaps as affluent
as some of the earlier days of the Romanovs.
And a lot of his work was predicated on spectacle,
on giving an image that was balanced, symmetrical and stable.
It was, in a sense, a paradigm of the monarchy itself.
And he was, as head of the Imperial Russian ballet,
as senior choreographer, that is,
he was responsible for giving a portrait of a serene society
that would mirror the desires of the regime.
And I think you have to look at those ballets in terms of their imperial aesthetic.
And times were changing.
The revolution wasn't very much down the road.
In fact, already revolts had begun to break out,
not at the time of Bayadere, but in Petipa's latter period.
And so I think you find a man that had simply lived too long in his job,
although still a great craftsman.
He was working with an aesthetic that no longer related to his time.
But time has proven kind to this great choreographer.
Today there isn't a dance star anywhere in the world
who wouldn't tell you that nobody has done more for this art form
than Marius Petipa.
For me, Petipa, it's one of the geniuses of our times.
I mean, he is the father of the classical choreographies.
So I have tremendous respect for Marius Petipa.
Case closed.
The End
Thank you.