The audience of the Primorsky Stage is going to enjoy the long-awaited ballet premiere. On December 15, 16 and 20, Rodion Shchedrin’s ballet The Little Humpbacked Horse will be shown. The main parts will be performed by the leading artists of the theater’s ballet troupe: ballet dancers Irina Sapozhnikova and Anna Samostrelova, premieres Sergey Umanets and Kanat Nadyrbek, soloists Katerina Floria, Liliya Berezhnova, Victor Mulagin, Oleksiy Skalyun, Sergey Amanbaev, Alexander Bykov and Sergey Zolotarev. Anton Torbeev will take the conductor’s stand of the Mariinsky Orchestra of the Primorsky Stage.
On the Primorsky stage of the Mariinsky Theatre, the ballet will be presented in the choreography of Alexei Ratmansky. For this performance he was awarded the prestigious National Theatre Award Golden Mask in 2010. The original production of the Mariinsky Theatre will be completely recreated on the Primorsky Stage. Alexei Ratmansky’s assistant, tutor choreographer Vyacheslav Khomyakov and coaches Elena Vorontsova and Maxim Khrebtov came to Vladivostok to transfer the ballet to the new stage.
Bright costumes and eccentric scenery for the Mariinsky Little Humpbacked Horse was created by one of the founders of the AXE Engineering Theatre, the winner of the Golden Mask Award Maxim Isaev. He also worked on the libretto, taking as a basis the well-known fairy tale poem by Pyotr Yershov. A cheerful and ironic plot in combination with the inventive choreography of Alexei Ratmansky opens up a wide scope for the performers’ creative work: acting, improvisation, and the embodiment of a technically difficult choreographic text.
The ballet score was written by Rodion Shchedrin when he was a student at the Moscow Conservatory. Later, the composer himself would describe this work as a landmark important for his creative self-assertion. Colorful and cheerful music inspired many prominent choreographers of the 20th century. Alexander Radunsky, Igor Belsky and Dmitry Bryantsev staged the ballet in different years, and in the 21st century, the advent of a new brilliant interpretation by Alexei Ratmansky came as another confirmation of Rodion Shchedrin’s status as a modern classic.
