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Kirov-Mariinsky Ballet, formerly Kirov Ballet, Russian ballet company located in Saint Petersburg, noted for its performances of classic works. The company dates from 1738, when French ballet master Jean-Baptiste Landé requested that Empress Anna Ivanovna grant him 12 students so that he could form a school in Saint Petersburg to promote the skills of Russian dancers. It became known as the Imperial Ballet School. Tsar Paul I invited French choreographer Charles Didelot to join the company in 1801. In 1828 Didelot laid the first foundations for a distinctly Russian style by creating a ballet based on a work of Russian literature: the poem Kavkazsky plennik (The Prisoner of the Caucasus, 1822) by Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin.
With the exception of Ivan Valbergh, who was appointed ballet master in 1794, non-Russian choreographers and ballet masters led the company until the 20th century. Most famous among these was French ballet master Marius Petipa, who in the late 19th century developed the company into a great performing vehicle, presenting his elaborate, formulaic ballets for the entertainment of the court. He developed a classical technique that, by the late 1890s, was comparable with the techniques of the best foreign dancers. In the 1890s Petipa produced the first ballets choreographed to symphonic music. From the music of Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky he created ballet masterpieces such as The Sleeping Beauty (1890), The Nutcracker (1892), and Swan Lake (with Acts II and IV choreographed by Petipa’s assistant Lev Ivanov, 1895). The score of Petipa’s ballet Raymonda (1898) is by Russian composer Aleksandr Glazunov. His masterpieces, now known as Petipa classics, have become standard ballets performed throughout the world.
The company survived the 1917 Russian Revolutions, and the 1920s were a period of hardship and experimentation. The 1930s saw productions of ballets on Soviet themes, such as Soviet dancer and choreographer Vassily Vainonen's Flames of Paris (1932); also during this period, director Agrippina Vaganova developed her system of teaching classical technique. Later productions included Laurentia (1939) and Romeo and Juliet with Galina Ulanova in 1940.
Under the direction of Konstantin Sergeyev and Natalia Dudinskaya, the company made its first tours of the West in the 1960s. With Rudolf Nureyev and, later, Mikhail Baryshnikov representing a new generation of dancers, the purity of the Vaganova school won international acclaim. The subsequent defections of Nureyev and Baryshnikov to the West had political repercussions on the policies of the company, though emphasis continued to be placed on restaging the classics and on lengthy tours to the West under the direction of Oleg Vinogradov from 1977 to 1997.
Due to changes in the political arena, the company and the theater that was its home went through many name changes. The ballet’s home from 1886 to 1917, the Mariinsky Theater, was named the State Mariinsky Theater from 1917 to 1920 and then the State Academic Theater for Opera and Ballet from 1920 to 1935. In 1935 the government changed the company’s name to the Kirov Ballet, after S. M. Kirov, a Communist Party leader assassinated that year. In 1991 the theater’s name reverted to Mariinsky Theater, and the title of the company officially became the Saint Petersburg Mariinsky Ballet. However, the company continues to be known outside Russia as the Kirov Ballet or Kirov-Mariinsky Ballet, and it uses the name Kirov-Mariinsky on international tours. In 1997 Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, director of the Mariinsky Theater, took over the directorship of the ballet company as well.
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