Igor Feodro-ovich Stravinsky's famous
ballet Petrouchka/Petrushka
In 1910, on the eve of the First World War; the Russian composer Stravinsky was working intensively on ballet after ballet, and Petrushka was the second of three monumental works written during this period.
Petrushka, the eternal clown of street puppetry in European countries,
is like the string clowns we saw in our childhood circuses. Though they go by different names in different countries,
the clowns entertain the audience while facing the same taunts and insults forever
. In his autobiography, the composer
wrote about the inspiration for the choreography: "One day I found the title I needed:
Petrushka, an unfortunate character found in fairs all over the world...When I was a little girl, every time
I heard a puppet troupe in the street yelling out 'Here comes Petrushka...'
I would go crazy to see the enchanting performance...I felt obliged to set up the image of this
old friend of the household name on a real stage. I knew
the way in which this dance drama should be staged...the puppets should be transformed into living beings at the command of a magician
...and the living beings shall have to suffer... "And so it was that, with the three puppets-Pepe <
Drushka, the ballerina, and the Moor, depicting the lives of the Russian lower
class people - their love, pain, and death - was born. It opens in St. Petersburg Square at the 1830 Carnival, where a noisy
crowd is greeted by an elderly sorcerer who takes out three puppets and plays a flute
to woo the audience; with the sound of the flute, the three puppets surprisingly come to life and
walk off the stage and out into the square to dance... ...Scene 2: Petrushka falls in love
with the ballerina, who treats him with disdain, and Petrushka
has to tell his troubles and despair to the sorcerer who has given him life and emotion. Scene
3: A jealous Petrushka breaks into the room where the actress is flirting and dancing with the
Moorish, and ends up getting beaten up by the Moor. Finale: The scene returns to the square of the festival: people are singing and dancing, when suddenly Petrushka enters, followed by the Moor with a sword, and the actress tries to dissuade him; during the fight Petrushka is killed by the Moor with a machete, and the crowd is in an uproar. The old sorcerer picks up Petrushka and shows him that he is only a puppet made of cloth, after which the audience disperses... The old sorcerer is busy unloading the stage, when he looks up and sees the apparition of a bruised and grinning Petrushka hovering above the theater, and is so terrified that he drops the puppet in his hand and flees into a deserted room. They dropped their puppets and fled into the darkness. ......
If "The Firebird" had the romantic warmth of Stravinsky's teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, the music in "Petrushka"
was a great example of this.
These musical overtones are nowhere to be found; instead, there's harsh sound
, gritty lines, and an outlandish plot. At the grave of Vaslav Nijinsky, one of the greatest
dancers of the last century,
sits Petrushka, a solitary bronze statue. It was one of Nicholas's most famous roles, and one he often used as a metaphor for himself.
Encouraged by the huge success of his ballet The Firebird, Gagilev
decided to stage another dance drama based on Russian folklore, which
was Petrushka. The libretto for the ballet Petrushka was
written by Stravinsky in collaboration with Benoit, with choreography by Fokine, set and costume
design by Benoit, and music by Stravinsky. The original inspiration for Petrushka came from the composer's free imagination: a conversation between a piano and a symphony orchestra leads to a life-and-death love affair between three puppets with different identities, and the enchanted arpeggios played by the piano portray a puppet called "Petrushka" (aka "Petrushka").
Puppet
image, he moves clumsily, not good at words, but pure feelings, attracting people to love.
The play premiered at the Théatre du Chatelet in Paris on June 13, 1911, with Nijinsky
in the male role and Carl Savannah in the female role. At the premiere Nijinsky's portrayal of Petrushka
was highly praised by Fokine. The success of the role of Petrushka
set a monument to Nijinsky's brilliant but short-lived career as an actor.
Fokine considered the dance drama Petrushka to be his own masterpiece, and unlike the dance drama
The Firebird, where he wrote the music and choreographed the dances at the same time, this time Fokine started working only after he
had the complete musical score. It is in Petrushka
that Fokine's idea of choreographic reform is most fully realized, pushing his choreographic
vision to the limit. The dances in the play employ few classical techniques, except for the use of "pointe" in the dancers' and the street girls'
dances. However,
the distinctive descriptive and interpretive nature of the dance is highly consistent with the auditory image and the visual image on the stage
he uses mechanical action to emphasize the individuality of the
puppet, and portrays the richness of the "characters" in the best possible way, bringing realism to the creation of the ballet. Ballet brought a realistic approach to composition.
Although Petrushka was the culmination of Fokine's creativity,
it met with a poor fate in Russia, where it was performed only in the 1920s during the Soviet period, and then restored by Poyarsky after a long hiatus, with performances in the Little Opera House in Leningrad (1961) and the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow (1964).
In 1977, the famous French choreographer Béjart re-staged Petrushka,
in a modernist style, performed by the 20th Century Ballet Company,
and featuring the famous Soviet dancer Vasiliev. This is the latest version of the work to be taken seriously by the world
dance world.
The dance drama Petrushka represents a high achievement of Russian ballet at the beginning of the 20th century in terms of realistic
psychological portrayal and dramatization, and its choreography and art
design are first-rate, and here, contrary to convention, the male protagonist outshines the female protagonist
and occupies the first place, which was relatively rare at that time.
Petrushka A ballet in four scenes
Play: Igor Stravinsky Tomb, Alexandre Bunoy
Choreography: Mikhail Fokine Music: Igor Stravinsky Tomb
Choreography: Alexandre Bunoy Première: Paris, June 13th, 1911
Starring Petr Fenshka -Tomb of Vaslav Nijins
Dancer - Damara Karzavina
Moorish - Alexander Orlov
Charlatan - Erik Cecchetti
Petrushka is an important work created by the Russian ballet master Fokine,
and an innovative masterpiece of the world ballet at the beginning of the 20th century. The story it describes
is this: in Petersburg in the 1830s, the bazaar is bustling with all kinds of
buying and selling, and people step on the snow to revel in the square. In the first scene,
in the center of the stage, out of the curtain of a street theater comes a bearded
juggler-magician Charlatan, who takes out his flute and with a secret signal causes
the curtain to open. Three puppets appeared on the stage: a dancing girl with
red circles painted on her cheeks, a grotesquely costumed black Moor, and Petrushka, whose mouth was in the shape of a figure-eight and who had
a sobbing face. They danced the trio mechanically,
changing formations
under the direction of the old magician. During the dance, the Moor fell in love with the dancer and murmured with
her from time to time, which caught Petrushka's attention, and he flew at her indignantly,
but was no match for the strong Moor. "Stop!" At the magician's command
the three puppets collapsed into confinement and were punished; he hated Charlatan and missed the Dancer,
and with the puppet's characteristic clumsy movements, he revealed his pent-up troubles and pain.
Petrushka was overjoyed when the dancer came to visit, but his foolish, rude
behavior scared him away. With the last of his strength, he fails to break out of his
cell and faints on the floor with his head hanging down. In the third scene, in the lavishly decorated
Moorish chamber, the Moor was playing with a coconut like a child, and
when he was about to use his machete to slice the fruit, he had a sudden thought-that there must be
a great god hidden in it, and at once, thinking of it, he bowed down in reverence to the ground.
The dancer danced a waltz in the old style, playing a toy horn. The Moor drops
coconuts to woo her, and at the climax of the duet, Petrushka breaks in and
interrupts their intimacy. The enraged Moor intimidates Petrushka with his saber and
kicks him out the door. The Moor picked up the fainting dancer and continued his merry dance.
In the fourth scene, the crowds continue their merrymaking in the marketplace, with the
dance of the coachmen and milkmaids unfolding, interspersed with drunken merchants and gypsy maidens,
and masquerading parties and animal trainers and a big bear appearing....... The carnival
scene grows increasingly rough! . Suddenly Petrushka lifted the curtain and rushed out,
The Moors were in hot pursuit with swords, and the dancers followed. Poor Petrushka
was slashed several times and fell dead. The raucous crowd gathered around the body and busily called for
a substitute officer. Charlatan came out and told the crowd that they were all puppets and could not kill anyone.
A false alarm was raised and the crowd dispersed. Charlatan picked up the puppets and was about to leave when
the orchestra played the theme song, which sounded like a song of injustice. He looked at the specter of
Petrushka appearing above the stage waving his fists and shivered with terror.
Poor Petrushka would not be recognized by anyone, though he had the same lamentations, life and death as a human being
.
"Petrushka" is a formally innovative piece of dance theater, with the three puppets portrayed
strikingly different and contrasting. Especially in portraying the character of Petrushka
Rushka, the choreographer dramatized
the classical dance technique with simplicity, and drenched his emotionally-charged character towards a tragic destiny.
All of this was a radical departure from previous ballet traditions and elicited a strong
reaction from the audience.
Stravinsky (1882-1971) also used
some completely new approaches to the music of the ballet. In the first rehearsals, Stravinsky himself accompanied the piano, since no one else could sight-read such a difficult score, let alone inspire the actors to understand it, and even choreographer-director
Falkin was often at a loss for words when it came to the complexity of the rhythms. And yet,
it is this music that brings so much inspiration and vivid color to the choreography, allowing the choreographer
a great deal of imagination through the music. Its status as an ancient
canon in modern ballet not only makes it musically complex, requiring a first-rate orchestra, but also
difficult to dance, especially in the role of Petrushka, which
must be performed by an actor with a great deal of feeling and a complete skill set. Since Nijins
ki's premiere, many of the world's leading
dancers, such as Marcin, Robbins, and Nureyev, have played the role with their own great skill.
In recent years, with the extensive revivals of the choreography, there has been a growing recognition
of the true value of this work.