24
April’18
Tuesday 20:00
Three Comrades
Ballet based on Erich Maria Remarque's novel of the same name to the music by Kurt Weill and Nils Frahm
premiere
The New Ballet Theatre
Conductor Alevtina Ioffe
Choreographer, Stage Director and Lighting Designer Nikita Dmitrievsky
Orchestration by Vladimir Beluntsov, Alevtina Ioffe
Video Graphics by Leonid Basin
Set Designer and Video Set Designer Alexander Zhitomirsky
Costume Designer Asya Solovieva
Soloists and Orchestra of the Natalia Sats Moscow State Opera and Ballet Theatre for Young Audience
TICKETS
On April 24, 2018 the Novaya Opera will host the New Ballet Theatre’s new production Three Comrades based on the Erich Maria Remarque novel.*
The cult classic book about the friendship of three front-line comrades was first translated in Russian in 1958. It inspired many contemporary artists for drama productions, film adaptations and literary research. But it has never been interpreted in ballet.
Germany after WWI is in economic crisis. People’s lives and souls are mutilated. As one of the characters says: “We live in the epoch of desperation.”On the outskirts of a small German town there live three young men, who try to earn their living every possible way. But for the three comrades their friendship is the only support and refuge from the world’s chaos. “Peaceful” time, i.e. hungry and jobless, has brought the friends closer together: they do not try so much to forget their past or to secure the present as to just live. But when the youngest of them falls in love and brings his girlfriend in their circle, their friendship is trialed by unforeseen and inevitable ordeals…
For this ballet Moscow choreographer Nikita Dmitrievskyused the 20th-century music, having combined excerpts from Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera and music by iconic contemporary composer Nils Frahm.
Echoes of German marches, combined with retro style elements, indefinite time spanand complete interaction with video installation and the orchestra, generate a strident dance-and-cry of the “lost generation”, whose destiny keeps reminding us that life is the only value worth preserving in any conditions and circumstances.