“First of the Premieres – Ballet”: Swan Lake at La Scala Milano

“First of the Premieres – Ballet”: Swan Lake at La Scala Milano.

With Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky in the choreographic version of Rudolf nureyev the Company's activity resumes after the summer break: nine years after the previous performances, the ballet returns to the stage from 15 to 27 September, in the precious and historic installation designed by Ezio Frigerio e Franca Squarciapino, second moment of tribute to Rudolf Nureyev, dopo Nutcracker, in the year that marks the thirtieth anniversary of his passing. This same ballet will also be the protagonist, the 27 Septemberand first live streaming after the summer on the LaScalaTV platform. The meeting intends to retrace the artistic and personal history that linked Rudolf Nureyev to ballet Swan Lake.

"Privileged mirror – as he points out Valentinam Bonelli, who will take care of the meeting – of his personality, as an interpreter and choreographer. A premonitory encounter, while still a child, in his Ufa, with a ballet which in the figures of the crane girls protagonists of a Tartar legend recalled the white swans of the most famous title. In Leningrad, the Swan Lake of the Kirov Theater is a spectacle admired countless times by the student of the last courses of the Vaganova Academy. Konstantin Sergeev's version, a Soviet evolution of Petipa-Ivanov's imperial ballet, will serve as a basis for the choreographer Nureyev when he re-stages the ballet in the West, having been invited countless times by European companies to dance in the ballet that best reveals his technical and temperamental skills . Also at the Teatro alla Scala, the first time in 1973, where he triumphed in Swan Lake alongside Carla Fracci and then Liliana Cosi. In 1964 Nureyev had already staged his first Swan Lake for the Vienna State Opera, with the now central figure of Prince Siegfried modeled on his personality. Together with autobiographical memories, Freudian echoes and Leonardesque quotations run through the definitive production of twenty years later, created for the Paris Opéra which Nureyev was directing at the time, which entered the repertoire of the Teatro alla Scala in 1990. On the Scaliger stage the choreographer he also appears as an interpreter, in the double role of the tutor Wolfgang and the magician Rothbart, in a dramaturgy in which the duplicity of the protagonists has symbolic value. Since then at La Scala the production has always remained in the repertoire, also loved by the dancers for the contemporary sensitivity of the characters and for the complex technique that challenges them with each take".

During the meeting, accompanied by vintage images and video clips, a choreographic analysis of the two acts and four scenes that mark the production will help to understand the peculiarities of the technique and style of Nureyev choreographer, as well as the differences with the Soviet version with which he trained as a dancer. Dance critic and ballet historian, Valentina Bonelli writes for Vogue Italia and is a correspondent for the magazines Dance Europe (UK), Dance Magazine (Japan), Dans (Sweden). You have translated and edited the Memoirs of Marius Petipa (Gremese 2010) and his Diaries (DNZ Media 2018) and authored numerous publications on the links between Italian and Russian ballet in the second half of the nineteenth century. Free admission while seats last.