The Encyclopedia of World Ballet by Snodgrass Mary Ellen

Author:Snodgrass, Mary Ellen [Snodgrass, Mary Ellen]
Language: ara
Format: azw3
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2015-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

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Kiev Ballet

Historically, the Kiev Ballet (KB) has preserved and promoted the grassroots tradition of Ukrainian dance. From prehistory, dance in the Ukraine influenced improvisational arts in Central Asia and shared narratives with Buddhist ritual. An outgrowth of drama and opera, the National Ballet of Ukraine formed on October 27, 1867, as the result of petitions from art lovers to the government for a residential repository of folklore and anti-noble peasant dance. The repertoire promoted the traditional sword dances, the nuptial hutsulka, and the hopak, a circle dance marked by claps and stomps and punctuated by the split leaps of male dancers.

A mark of prestige, a KB performance before composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky of The Oprichnik (The Guardsman, 1874) at the Russian Opera House raised national perception of Ukrainian artistry. At the rise in Kiev’s reputation for the arts in 1887, Polish actor-ballet master Stanislav Lenchevsky designed indigenous dances. As the company increased in size and precision, in 1893, it added narrative ballet to its repertoire and performed in traditional costumes, boots, and box headdress.

Professional Instruction

A fire on February 4, 1896, destroyed KB scores, tutus, slippers, and sets. Recovered by 1910, the ensemble expanded study and performance of classical and contemporary works. Soloist Mikhail Mordkin, a thirty-year-old graduate of the Bolshoi Ballet School, left Moscow during the 1917 Revolution and taught Ukrainians the flamboyant combinations of the Ballets Russes. At the Young Theatre in 1919, he premiered ethnomusicologist Igor Hiutel’s Azaide, Alexander Ilyinsky’s Nur and Anitra (1906), playwright Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna (1919), and Mykola Lysenko’s Utoplena (The Drowned Maiden, 1919) and Taras Bulba (1924), a poetized opera replete with nonnarrative Tartar dance and Cossack marches.

In the struggle for independence, Kiev’s few trained residential performers stressed Ukrainian music and arts, but lacked the numbers to mount narrative ballet. A self-exile since 1916, dancer-dance coach Bronislava Nijinska initiated avant-garde rhythms and gestures in January 1919 at Kiev’s l’École de Mouvement, a training ground for soloist-choreographer Serge Lifar. In 1923, Nijinska fused folk values with classical style for a stylized variation of Les Noces (The Wedding), a balletic study of village promotion of the nuclear family.

Throughout the late 1920s, ballet and opera tours familiarized the working class with Ukrainian talent and folk background. On October 18, 1931, KB premiered Pan Kanyovsky (Mr. Kanyovsky), the first nationalistic symphonic ballet, composed by Mikhailo Verikivsky. Critics recognized the value of local themes to patriotism.

Choreographer Igor Moiseyev, a Gallo-Romanian-Russian trained at the Bolshoi, reshaped the local troupe into a theatrical folkloric ballet. He introduced participants to authentic barre discipline, the introit to earthy character dance. Male dancers learned the nanayo (boy fight), a choreographed hand-to-hand combat without rules. The ensemble presented Moiseyev’s thirty-eight-minute Night on Bald Mountain (1935), a nightmarish dance reprising a story by Nikolai Gogol to the music of Modest Mussorgsky. After earning a gold medal at the 1935 London International Folklore Dance Festival, the KB broadened its program to compete on a global level. In 1935 and 1937, public

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