Ballet

We went and saw a ballet the other day.
La Bayadere - or Bayaderka in Russian.
It was fabulous - I liked the servant - one of fakirs - the best. You can see his performance towards the middle end of this youtube clip- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlNEKBf1qsE

The ballet is about a young warrior who falls in love with an Indian temple dancer. Meanwhile the Temple priest is also in love with her - And at the same time one of the Lords is planning that the Young Warrior should marry his daughter. The father and daughter decide that the bayadere must die and the Bayadere chooses to die rather than betray her love to the young warrior and marry the priest. So you have plenty of intrigue. The clip below is of the daughter Gamzatti as she dances at her wedding.

The most interesting thing - reading up on it on Wikipedia is that this is considered one of Russia's most important ballet but because of Soviet times - it didn't "get out" of Russia until the 1960's and even then not all of it got out and parts of the music were lost and other parts modified because western dancers couldn't achieve the poses that the Russian dances could or the western stages weren't as large or spacious as the stage that the Ballet was originally written for. So this ballet has probably more interpretations than your average ballet.

Another interesting thing is that the last scene is sometimes left off. Instead of ending with the underworld revenge and temple collapse, it ends with a dream where The young man sees his dead beloved in the underworld and dances with her a last time. at 2.5 hours - (with pauses) it was a long ballet and so I imagine the original ending would make it very long and difficult for the dancers - they had quite a few jumps that they had to undertake in the score.