Boston, Tchaikovsky, and birthdays - Boston Ballet celebrates its 30th anniversary produces a Tchaikovsky Festival in honor of the 100th anniversary of the composer Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky's death - Column

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1994 by Clive Barnes

It was a happy coincidence of anniversaries that almost serendipitously started it off. Nineteen ninety-three (well, 1994, actually) happened to be the thirtieth birthday of the Boston Ballet. Then, as the company's artistic director, Bruce Marks, noted, it was also the one hundredth anniversary of Tchaikovsky's death. What more appropriate celebration therefore could possibly be staged than the Boston Ballet paying homage to ballet's greatest composer, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky?

Once postulated it became obvious. A Tchaikovsky Festival, with virtually all of the Boston Ballet's 1993-94 birthday season being given over to Tchaikovsky ballets, with music that was either written for the ballet or appropriated--usually appropriately--by it. The planb is to run the gamut of Tchaikovskiana, from Balanchine's Serenade to John Cranko's Onegin, which, incidentally, will be having its first production by a United States company. Tchaikovsky himself--and mention of Onegin reminds us--was, in fact, far more intersted in opera than in ballet, but for all that his music dances as much as it signs.

So much of Tchaikovsky is based on folk music, and Russian folk music, Slavic folk music for that matter, is very much based on dance. Dance even plays an enormous role in the fabric of the symphonies. However, it is with his three major ballet scores, Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and The Sleeping Beauty, that Tchaikovsky's real contribution to the art of dance can be measured.

No composer--with the possible exception of Igor Stravinsky--has left a deeper impression on ballet, particularly when it is realized that Stravinsky's scores were probably of more importance to musical than dance history. But Tchaikovsky's ballets, especially the two he wrote in close collaboration with Marius Petipa, represented a new seriousness in ballet itself. A good case can be made that The Sleeping Beauty, as masterminded by Ivan Vsevolojsky, director of the Russian Imperial Theatres at the time, was the first modern ballet.

Although The Sleeping Beauty was first given in January 1890, almost three years before The Nutcracker, the second and final Petipa-Tchaikovsky collaboration in December 1892, it was not until 1949, when Britain's Royal Ballet brought it to New York City, that it was really seen in North America. As early as 1946 in New York Pavlova had performed a brief one-act version staged by Ivan Clustine, while during the thirties both Mikhail Mordkin and Catherine Littlefield staged their own American versions. Yet, strangely enough, it fell to the still-emergent Royal Ballet (about to be dubbed by its American impresario, Sol Hurok, "the fabulous Sadler's Wells Ballet"), with a cast led by Margot Fonteyn, Robert Helpmann, Beryl Grey, Violetta Elvin, and Alexis Rassine, to offer the American Public the "authentic" Petipa version as staged by Nicholas Sergeyev, Petipa's own regisseur.

Why did it take so long, and why did it finally arrive under such unexpected auspices? A whole history is wrapped up there--many histories, in fact: ballet, political, sociopolitical. Suffice it to say that the British first brought it, that no American company at that time was ready to do it, and that (together with the Royal Ballet's staging of the full-length Swan Lake) its wholehearted acceptance changed the face of ballet on this continent. Today, local productions of The Sleeping Beauty are given across all of North America. And now Ben Stevenson's Houston Ballet, which also has Sleeping Beauty as well as Swan Lake and The Nutcracker in its repertoire is, like Boston, planning a Tchaikovsky centennial season.

But Marks wanted something rather special to open his own celebration--something worthy of the start of Boston's fourth decade. He settled on The Sleeping Beauty, but in a brand-new staging, a production by the company's Kirov-trained associate director, Anna-Marie Holmes. The production, as it has turned out, seems to combine much that is the best in the present St. Petersburg version, as staged by the late Konstantin Sergeyev, and in Nicholas Sergeyev's version, still preserved by the Royal Ballet.

Today, the Boston Ballet can be taken as a paradigm of the manner in which classical ballet has developed in the United States. It started as an off-shoot of New England Civic Ballet of Boston, a nonprofessional company, dating from 1958, developed by E. Virginia Williams from her school. Assistance from the Ford Foundation enabled it to become Boston Ballet in 1963 and to give its first professional performance a year later. The company developed interestingly over the years--in 1980 it was the first U.S. company to visit China, and it toured widely with Rudolf Nureyev, dancing in his staging of Don Quixote. But it was the arrival of Marks in 1985, building on the groundwork done by Williams and later by Violette Verdy, that finally made this a troupe of real international caliber.

Three years ago, Marks and Holmes brought Sergeyev and his wife, the great Kirov ballerina and teacher, Natalia Dudinskaya (who, together with Tatiana Legat, also helped with the coaching of this Sleeping Beauty) to mount a highly successful Swan Lake, which more or less followed the Kirov mold and introduced many Russian guest artists, mingling them with the home troupe. This time Boston has decided that charity begins at home, and all the casts (six Auroras and four--a fifth was injured--Princes) are drawn from Boston dancers. The unusually opulent scenery and costumes by David Walker are of Royal Ballet provenance.