Jerome Robbins’s IN THE NIGHT is part of Chopin evening presented by the Mariinsky Ballet at BAM (photo by N. Razina)
THE MARIINSKY BALLET
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
January 24 (7:30) & 25 (3:00), $30-$175
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.mariinsky.ru/en
St. Petersburg’s legendary Mariinsky Theatre, now in its 232nd season, concludes its nearly two-week residency at BAM with the Mariinsky Ballet performing Chopin: Dances for Piano, a lovely evening of three diverse works that effortlessly blend together. The program, with Valery Gergiev serving as musical director, begins with Michel Fokine’s elegant 1908 piece Chopiniana, with revised choreography by Agrippina Vaganova, in which eighteen women dressed in white tutus with small wings attached at the back surround several principal dancers, including the sole male, Timur Askerov, forming different groupings, from circles to lines, often coming to a stop in difficult yet beautiful positions, in front of a forest set designed by Vladimir Dementiev and Alexei Popov based on original sketches by Orest Allegri. The relative quiet of Alexandra Zhilina’s piano allows the percussive tapping of their in-union en-pointe movement to echo through the Howard Gilman Opera House. Chopiniana is followed by Benjamin Millepied’s dynamic 2011 work Without, in which five pairs of dancers, the women in red, orange, green, blue, and violet dresses, the men in similarly colored tops, with black pants and shoes (Millepied designed the costumes as well), interact with strong emotions, creating different relationships in short vignettes; it’s quite a relief when the dancers finally match up by color. On January 24, the pairings were Anastasia Matvienko and Konstantin Zverev, Kristina Shapran and Andrey Ermakov, Ndezhda Batoeva and Filipp Stepin, Tatiana Tiliguzova and Ernest Latypov, and Margarita Frolova and Xander Parish, with Philipp Kopachevsky playing Chopin preludes and études. If you took Chopiniana and Without and mixed them together, you’d end up with Jerome Robbins’s splendid 1970 piece, In the Night. In this staging by Ben Huys, stars twinkle on a back curtain as three couples (Anastasia Matvienko and Filipp Stepin, Yekaterina Kondaurova and Yevgeny Ivanchenko, and Viktoria Tereshkina and Yuri Smekalov) perform a series of graceful pas de deux in costumes by Anthony Dowell, with Liudmila Sveshnikova at the piano. Chopin: Dances for Piano is an exquisite trip through the history of the Mariinsky, with works separated by more than one hundred years, set to the majestic music of a masterful composer.