Russian Classical Ballet
Works by Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) were an important milestone in the history and development of ballet. Essentially, it was Tchaikovsky who made ballet a fully-fledged musical and drama genre and released music from its role as illustration to choreography. The composer worked mostly in the rigid frame of ballet dramaturgy. The music of all his ballets is adaptive, choreographic, objective and, at the same time, it has the power of generalization that gives symphonic features to a theatrical piece.
The fairy tale about the Sleeping Beauty is known in several adaptations. Two of them became classics – by the Brothers Grimm and by Charles Perrault. Tchaikovsky’s ballet was written to a libretto by Ivan Vsevolozhsky and the great choreographer Marius Petipa based on Perrault’s version. The premiere took place in 1890 at the Mariinsky Theatre. An abundance of splendid character dances, complete music characteristics of the protagonists and the beauty of each number blend in The Sleeping Beauty with the wonderful quality that the prominent musicologist and composer Boris Asafiev called “wholeness of music-and-choreographic performance”.
The Russian Classical Ballet offers the Petipa version adapted by Valentin Grischenko.
The Petipa Russian Classical Ballet was founded in 2007.
“Talent and loyalty to the classical traditions of Russian ballet” is the artistic motto of the company. Its main goal is twofold: on the one hand the company seeks to preserve the classical traditions of Russian ballet and, on the other hand, it looks for new, more contemporary forms of the choreographic art and explores new directions and possibilities of choreography.
The basis of the company's repertoire includes masterpieces of classical ballet such as Adam’s Giselle, Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella, Minkus’ Don Quixote, Bizet-Shchedrin’s Suite Carmen to mention but a few. A special page of the repertoire is Tchaikovsky’s three
ballets – Swan Lake, The Nutcracker and The Sleeping Beauty.
Today the company has over 40 ballet dancers. They are graduates of the best choreographic schools in Russia and the former USSR, namely in Moscow, Leningrad-St. Petersburg, Perm, Novosibirsk, Kiev to mention a few.
The theatre has toured in many countries of the world including Italy, Switzerland, France, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Luxembourg, China, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, the USA, the UAE and some others.
The artistic director of the company, Valentin Grischenko believes that ballet is not just a show, but an art demanding special sensitivity from both the performer and the spectator. In preserving the traditions of Russian classical ballet, the theatre makes a contribution to the development of this art all over the world.
