Radu Poklitaru presented Kyiv Modern Ballet’s Christmas performance
The choreographer created his new production with his own money.
At the Kyiv Municipal Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre for Children and Youth, the new work of the famous choreographer and head of “Kyiv Modern Ballet” Radu Poklitaru — “The Long Christmas Dinner” — was presented.
“This is the longest-running project of my life,” Radu Poklitaru recounted. “We began staging the production in 2009. And we all remember what a difficult year that was. At the time we staged the first 15 minutes of the piece. The crisis came and, unfortunately, the premiere was postponed. Now, when we were restoring that part of the performance from the video recording, we realized that most of the performers are new. We even joke at the theatre that this is such a long-running project precisely because that is exactly what it is called – ‘The Long Christmas Dinner.’”
This is a one-act ballet based on the eponymous work by Thornton Wilder, set to Antonio Vivaldi’s music “The Four Seasons.” Wilder’s play tells of 90 years in the life of the American Bayard family, which pass in the form of Christmas dinners. The characters’ lives are cyclical: they fall in love, marry, give birth to children, and die in identical fashion.
In Radu Poklitaru’s view, “The Christmas Dinner” is a ballet-meditation on how aimlessly people live out their lives, filling them with bustle, with affairs that have no sense whatsoever.
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“Since 2009 I had not reread the play and, while working on the production, I drew on the baggage I already have. It is hard to hope that people, after watching the performance, will reread Hoffmann, Mérimée, Wilder. I draw on my own conception of the work, which is more or less similar to what people will bring with them into the hall. That is why Wilder’s idea is far more important than a literal following of the plot and the characters. It lies in how important it is to leave at least something behind you. If we manage to convey this to the audience’s consciousness, then we shall be happy; if not, it will simply be a long Christmas dinner,” Radu Poklitaru believes.
This is the first interpretation of Wilder’s play in ballet. The roles in the production are performed by 21 artists of the company.
The costumes for Radu Poklitaru’s production were once again created by the artist Dmytro Kuriata. All of them are made of silk and velvet and stylized after the early 20th century.
“A month before the premiere it turned out that there were no tickets for ‘The Long Christmas Dinner’ three days running. The Ukrainian public this year, oddly enough, has changed greatly,” Radu Poklitaru stated. “We are seeing unreal full houses. At the Odesa Opera there was not a single ticket for ‘The Nutcracker’ several months in advance. We have just been showing this performance at the October Palace, and for the first time in six years we had ticket scalpers at work. In Ukraine right now, despite the situation in the country and the appalling neglect of culture in general, the ordinary spectator has a very great interest.”
Katia Kunytska
LB.ua
