Today's Watching

Blogger The New Neo has a special expertise in dance so it is a pleasure to read her thoughts on Petrouchka by Stravinsky, the second of his ballets for the Ballets Russes.

Watching Petrouchka

Michel Fokine’s ballet “Petrouchka,” created in 1911, is one I’ve seen many times. But perhaps I’ll never see it again, because I have a feeling it’s pretty much banned now. I’m virtually certain that one of its puppet characters, the Moor, would be considered irredeemably racist today.

The music is my favorite Stravinsky composition by far. The Fokine choreography is surpassingly strange, and the stage is full of people much of the time, with every character doing something different and creating the impression of a village fair come to life. The costumes are wonderful, with less of an ensemble quality and more like the individual costumes worn by the actors in a play. It’s a ballet, but only three characters wear pointe shoes, and two are street entertainers and one is a puppet. There are three puppets, but they periodically escape from the confines of puppitude and take on a life of their own.

You should read the whole thing. I realize that Petrouchka is by far my favorite ballet as well.

 I stop to marvel, once again, at the astonishing creativity of Stravinsky who wrote the music for three extremely fine but extremely different ballets over the course of just a couple of years: The Firebird (1910), Petrouchka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). I'm not sure he ever matched this level of creativity. Actually, I'm not sure anyone has!

Could someone please invent a time machine so we could go back and see these premieres?