The Ballet Lover's Companion by Zoe Anderson

Author:Zoe Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780300154283
Publisher: Yale University Press

The Flames of Paris

Choreography: Vasily Vainonen

Libretto: Nikolai Volkov, Vladimir Dmitriev

Advising director: Sergei Radlov

Music: Boris Asafiev

Designs: Vladimir Dmitriev

Premiere: 7 November 1932, Kirov Theatre, Leningrad. Restaged 7 June 1933, Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow

Original cast: Jeanne Feya Balabina; Jerome Alexei Yermolayev; Thérèse Nina Anisimova

In The Flames of Paris, Soviet ballet celebrated the Russian Revolution by looking back to the French Revolution. The ballet was originally created in four acts: an uprising in Marseilles; a ball at the palace of Versailles, where the actress Mireille rejects the corrupt court to join the revolution; the storming of the Tuileries; and a final act of celebrations. The storming of the Tuileries, a spectacular scene, was performed on 6 November 1932 to mark the fifteenth anniversary of Russia’s own revolution of 1917. The next night, the complete ballet had its first performance in Leningrad, while Moscow dancers performed the third act. The Flames of Paris joined the Bolshoi repertory in 1933, with a cast that included Vakhtang Chabukiani as Jerome.

Vasily Vainonen had worked with Balanchine’s ‘Young Ballet’ group, where he created his spectacular, acrobatic ‘Moskovski Waltz’. In The Flames of Paris he created several leading roles, but the ballet’s main hero was the revolutionary crowd itself. Boris Asafiev’s score drew on French songs of the period, particularly the Marseillaise, and ‘Ça ira’ which was sung during the storming of the Tuileries: the huge cast closed ranks and slowly advanced on the footlights, muskets in hand, to the song’s menacing drumbeat. In the twenty-first century, Alexei Ratmansky called this ‘a mise-en-scène of genius … You know, the accent is on count two, it’s very syncopated, which is very common for Vainonen’s style. That makes it very, very exciting.’17

In celebrating the revolutionaries, Vainonen used folk dances from the period, both for the corps de ballet and for individual soloists. The large-scale carmagnole and the fierce Basque dances were particularly admired. The character dancer Nina Anisimova, who danced Thérèse, worked closely with Vainonen on her role; colleagues from the first production observed that she created many of her own steps. She went on to become one of Soviet ballet’s first female choreographers, creating the evening-length ballet Gayaneh, famous for its pas de deux and its sabre dance, to music by Aram Khachaturian.

Descriptions of the first production vary, particularly in the details of the first act. This synopsis focuses on the action common to all accounts.

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