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Even though Ballet's been around since the 1600s,
when most people think about ballet what they're really thinking about is
romantic era ballet, nineteenth century ballet.
Tchaikovsky, that's everybody's um..
mental picture of ballet, so the 19th century is a really
important time in the ballet, it's developed quite a lot since we came from
Louis the Fourteenth, so what's happened so far?
So we've already seen that women have started to wear shorter skirts, so we can
actually see their feet, because
what's the point of ballet if you can't see what their feet are doing after all. But, now we're going to
see
even shorter skirts, so we can see all the leg movement. Now there's a lot
of muscles being used if you're a ballet dancer
and we want to be able to see uh.. the beauty of the lines that the dancers are
creating.
This is also a period of time when dancers started dancing
on point, thats the English version of on porte.
My French is terrible, you know that, but dancing on their toes.
That's a relatively modern idea for
the ballet. So, the woman who was create... credited with
both really shortening up the skirt and dancing on point
is Marie Taglioni. Marie seem to be very common name for
ballet dancers, maybe you just had to be a Marie to be a dancer, because all the
famous ones in the early days were named Marie. So, she
was the one who shortend that up. We have a.. a picture of her, not a
photograph obviously from that period of time but we do have a painting of her that
I
uh.. would like you take a look at so that you can see
sort of the style, so she's got
a shorter dress, it's not as short *** the little tutus that you might think of
when you
have your mental picture of ballet, but it is a shorter skirt so that you can see
her leaps and umm.. all those little fancy things that they do
and she's also dancing on point, it was a very important thing at that time.
In the romantic period, ballerinas really kinda became the be all and end all
of ballet, if you think about the major title character's
for ballet, Sleeping Beauty, Woman
Swan Lake.
the swans, women. Odette,
Giselle, yeah
the names the titles are almost all women, the men
obviously have roles, but it's really all about a star vehicle for women for a
good bit of the Romantic period.
Thankfully, the Russians
were really still focusing on male dancers
and even if you think.. you think about the most famous male
dancers in ballet, where, you know, we're talking about Naginsky
and um.. Barishnikov, Russians.
And that's.. the reason for that is that the Russians were still
work in developing male dancers and female dancers, so they sort of saved
the whole world of dance for men
by developing this really strong program. There's a particular
person associated with that Russian ballet thats a name you should recognize
and thats Mariusz
Petipa, he was a choreographer. So what's a choreographer?
That's the person who actually writes the dance.
They don't just go out there and make it up as they go, right, anymore than the musicians
just go out and make it up as they go
so, he was a.. a French choreographer,
but he worked with Russian dancers. So he brought all that
history of French ballet which you know they developed almost everything all the
language is in French,
but then he worked with these really, extremely well-trained,
Russian dancers to come up with what is
considered now, some of the best ballet productions ever.
He worked with Tchaikovsky,
who is the big-name for um.. Russian ballet from the
uh.. romantic period. Tchaikovsky wrote three ballets;
Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and
Nutcracker are the three,
I...just..I don't like to deal with The Nutcracker, you know, it's one of those that gets done, everybody knows it but,
it's probably not the work I would choose to talk about if I were going to
do a big thing about it. So, he has these three big ballets,
um... let's talk about how those ballets are structured.
If you think about ballet as a team sport,
there are layers of players,
so you have your stars, you have the ballerina, the prima ballerina,
who's the big star. She's yours Sleeping Beauty,
your ode..Odeal in Swan Lake. Then you have your sort of second-team
dancers who are working their way up to be the prima ballerina there is usually three
or four of those who...
who get them maybe some little..
they may get some solo dances of their own, but they often will dance
surrounding the star, and then you have
all the other dancers who are the supporting cast, so if
you think about in Swan Lake, all those big scenes with all the Swans
fluttering about the pond, that's all the rest of those dancers.
we have a similar hierarchy on the male side so there's
the main the uh.. main male dancer and we don't call him the ballerino,
he's just the male dancer, ummm.. and then
there are usually a couple of other male dancers who are sort the second
teer, who often have some sort of specialty and they've and even the women often
have a specialty.
umm.. a woman might be a specialist in dancing on point so
her solos will have her dancing like, forever
on our toes and you think she can't possibly stay up there any longer and then she
keeps going,
and the men will be come often more acrobatic so they might specialize in
doing pirouettes,
spinning around and around. They might specialize in leaps
umm.. so or even something thats umm..
really acrobatic so that they can um get some of those roles
in the ballet where they need somebody to be a
Chinese dancer who's doing
hands and backflips and jumps and all those sorta exciting things.
So that's the basic structure of how the uh.. the
cast itself is put together and as you watch productions of ballet
you will see that, especially in romantic ballet, that
almost everybody has a chance. So there aren't many ballets where there's just
the ballerinas and just the top tier everybody has some sort role to fulfill
um..
So, I would like you to take a look at um.. some scenes from Swan Lake,
give you a general idea the story of Swan Lake is um
about Siegfried, who was a prince, gotta have a prince in
these stories and he has gone hunting for swans.
guess they didn't keep they didn't think swans were
so pretty as we think them today, today we think ahhh. oooh cute swans.
He goes hunting for swans, and of course there's tons of them in
this big pond, but then there's this one swan that catches his eye
and turns out she's really a woman who's been enchanted and turned into a swan
and she needs a handsome prince to save her, that kinda fairy tale
sort approach to things and he falls in love with her. That's
Odette, so she's the swan that's always dressed in white umm...
when you think the dying Swan, you know that that's her role.
So he's..he's in love with her: well he goes back home
and because he's a prince he's expected to marry you know it and
so there's always a big party almost every Tchaikovsky ballet has
some sort of big party scene. It's a chance to get all the rest of the crowd on the stage.
So as you watch those, Pay attention to how different people
act. There will be a lot of characters on the stage who don't really dance much at all
and you'll see that they're not wearing toe shoes either, they're wearing
basically what you think it was a sort of a street shoe, it's got a heel.
like they would have worn back in Louis the 14ths time.
We refer to those as character shoes, they're characters and they're
wearing their shoes, but they're not going to be dancing
the fancy stuff. Many of the people who played those particular roles in a ballet
company
are people who used to be um...
you know, just part the regular, star
kind of core, but once they reached the point, because it's very taxing
discipline, there there are no forty-year-old
um..angenieuxs in ballet. then they they roll over and they play the roles of the
parents
or people in the village and so they still get to do the dancing part they're just
not doing that quite as physically demanding dances they
would have done earlier. So you can tell those buy their clothes and their shoes,
because they're going to be wearing
generally umm.. costumes are appropriate for
the story, whereas the the other people might be weird things that are looking
allow for dancing to work a little better, so you can tell differences in the
characters that way.
One of the things that Tchaikovsky likes to do in these party scenes and their is..one..
as I said, there's one and I think in every one of his ballets
is that this is a chance to incorporate
music of different cultures.
Remember, Tchaikovsky's in the romantic period where
exoticism was a big thing, trying to write music that
sounded like it came from some other country. So in these party scenes there's always,
always something like
there's a Russian dance, there's a Chinese dance, there's an Arabian dance,
there's different kinds of cultures be represented.
He's written music that is supposed to sound like that. They wear costumes from
whatever country it is they are supposed to represent
and it's just uhhh..it really doesn't advance the plot at all,
but it's a great chance for everybody to hear this wonderful music and for everybody else
to get to do a dance, so
umm.. I've given you one scene. Where you get to to see the party scene and this is
where
umm.. Siegfried's parents are bringing in all the eligible
princessy types for him to choose from. So,
this is..they have picked the girl so you can see that there are women around who
are
not part of the um
we'll call them ethnic dances that these are the women that he's supposed to choose from.
So he's got to make this choice, but he has of course already fallen in love with Odette
the swan.
Well, the man who put the curse on Odette
has a daughter himself, and he has brought his daughter to this party because he
wants his daughter to marry the prince.
His daughter is Odeal, Odette and Odeal are danced by the same woman
and ...dat... you can take this as sort of psychology project, here right, so this is
the good side and this is the bad side so Odette, she is..
she's always wears black
and she dances much more dramatically than the swan, the swan
the swan's got to be graceful and all that.. Odette's
the swan, grace. Odeal is more
umm.. flashy you might say in her dancing.
So now, poor Sigfrit is confused, I..uh.. uhh sort of
recognize this, but not quite sure we're not supposed to
get that she's the same person, um so then he'd agree he's gonna marry her but
then he realizes that he.. it's still Odette
and that it's all just a big mess.
well the ending of the story changes, depending on who decides to put on the
protection,
so sometimes Odette and Siegfried get together and everybodys all happy and
sometimes things don't end so well, so I've given you
the ending of this ballet
so that you can see this particular choreographer and directors
choice as to how to end the story.
So we have siegfried, we have Odette
and obviously Odette and Odeal can't be on stage at the same time because
they're the same person, but sometimes they will do interesting things like
um.. have a, especially today, they could do a recording of the other
character, they'll have projected on the back like
um.. sort of a memory thing, that is he remembers her and he sees it in his mind's
eye sort of approach.
So, as you look at these um.. excerpts, as I said, I've given you one
um that has a crowd scene, I'm giving you some of the classic Swan Lake
swanee things, and also that final scene
so you can see what audiences in the nineteenth century
loved about ballet, and here some the wonderful music of Tchaikovsky that
accompanies it.
When you hear this music without the ballet,
which is probably more common, remember that it will be called a suite, so it would say
suite from um.. Swan Lake, and they would have chosen only
the orchestral bits that they wanted to use, put them together in a little set
and our orchestra will play it without any dancers so as you're looking for
productions to go to if you decide you'd like to go see ballet live,
make sure that they're actually doing the ballet and not just an orchestral
suite from the ballet, because then you would be disappointed.
So, enjoy Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake.