Ballet Day

It was ballet start to finish on Sunday, our last day in St. Petersburg. In the morning, Mom and I walked the 15 minutes from our meager hotel to the Sheremetev Palace to see a small gem-like exhibit on Russian ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev. What a handsome young man. Notoriously impulsive, Nureyev had little patience with rules, limitations and hierarchical order. Not long for Russia, given this temperament! At 23, he defected to the West, despite KGB efforts to stop him, and lived his life in gai Paris. Nureyev is credited with single-handedly transforming the role of the male ballet dancer from strong-man prop, good for little more than lifting ballerinas, to center stage. He died of AIDS at 55.

The exhibit included costumes from a wealth of ballets: Swan Lake, Don Quixote, Romeo and Juliet, Raymonda, Giselle, among others.












In the evening, following another shaslik (shish-kebab) dinner at the Uzbek restaurant, we walked to the Mihailovsky Theater to see the Jacobsen Ballet's modern production of Romeo and Juliet. Such a rapturous score, Mr. Prokofiev! And the dancers, per Russian reputation, were at once so powerful and so delicate: such leaps with the softest purr of landings. But what really sent me swooning was the dramatic forcefulness, the archetypal imagery everywhere. The sparse sets featured huge wheels (of fate) and towering, sword-like shafts, lit at the tips, tilting in from and constricting both sides of the stage, like the lowering of a drawbridge over the doomed love story. Mab, Shakespeare's fairy queen, wound her way through every scene, her face masked in black, foreshadowing and then impelling all of the fated deaths.

Photos of course were prohibited during the ballet, so I'm including a pre-production shot of the orchestra pit, balconies and stage with its majestic curtain.

Two days later and I still feel transported, as does Mom.