Today I Went to the Theater...

If I had written a post about each and every ballet I have watched since I started blogging, then this blog would now be the most boring and repetitive blog in existence. That is not to say that I haven't written about this at all; I was excited to tell about my first visit to the Mariinsky theater (here), and about when I saw La Bayadere for the first time in my entire life (here), and the time when my friends and I were able to sit in actual seats instead of having to stand through the entire show (here). I just decided that nobody really wants to hear about all four of the times I have gone to see Don Quixote, especially since the lead roles were danced by the same people in three of those four performances. While I am a student at the Vaganova Academy, I am able to get free standing-room tickets to almost any Mariinsky Theater performance, and this is a gift and privlidge that I appreciate and which I try not to waste. I simply try to limit my blogging on the subject to the most interesting and eventful of the shows that I attend. The show that I just attended qualifies as being sufficiently interesting and eventful.

Soon after I arrived in Saint Petersburg, I decided that I would very much like to see Uliana Lopatkina, one of the Mariinsky's best and most famous principal dancers, perform in Swan Lake, my favorite ballet ever. Soon enough, a show was coming in which she was to dance the lead in that ballet, so I went and got myself a ticket. All was well until I learned that I would have a rehearsal on the evening of the performance. Determined to see at least some of it, I hurried to the theater as soon as I had finished, arriving (wearing sweatpants and carrying a bag of dance shoes and a plastic grocery sack with a very sad  practice tutu rolled up inside) in time to see the last third of the ballet (and then I wrote a blog post about it). Glad that I'd seen at least that, I was still determined to see more and asked for tickets when I saw that Uliana Lopatkina would be dancing in another upcoming performance of Swan Lake. Things proceeded to play out like a bad comedy, and, again, I found out just days before the performance that I would have a rehearsal on the evening I was planning to go to the theater. Again, I rushed to the theater after finishing my rehearsal, arrived in a similar state of disarray, and this time managed to see about half of the performance. When I got tickets for the next time Uliana Lopatkina would be dancing in Swan Lake, again a rehearsal was scheduled for that very evening. This time I gave up and handed the ticket off to a friend.

Though there is a ballet or two performed nearly every single evening, the Mariinsky repertoire is massive and they have a lot of different dancers who perform each role. It would be very unusual for the same ballet to be performed each day for more than about three days in a row; you could easily go to the theater every day for a week and end up seeing five different ballets and an opera or two. Thus, the only way to know what shows are scheduled and who will be performing in them is to carefully check the schedule posted on the Mariinsky Theater's website, and then you have to ask for tickets to the performance before they're all gone. The principal dancers must be given sufficient time between each of their performances, so the biggest stars tend to perform, at most, a couple times each month.

My roommate is an enthusiastic admirer of Uliana Lopatkina, and thus the two of us have spent all year carefully searching the Mariinsky's website for her upcoming shows. When I saw that Lopatkina would be performing Swan Lake on April 11, I was ecstatic. My roommate asked for tickets, and I spent the next three weeks hoping that we wouldn't have a rehearsal scheduled for that day. By some miracle, we didn't. I was thrilled.

I'm not entirely sure what my reaction would have been if we'd had a rehearsal scheduled. We have them frequently enough that it would not be an unexpected thing, but that rationality most certainly would not have lessened my disappointment. It's possible, though unlikely, that Uliana Lipatkina will perform in Swan Lake again before the end of June, when I will depart from Russia. I would have been quite upset if I had to leave after having this opportunity slip through my fingers so many times.

I've been waiting impatiently for this night all week long. I've been trying to see this ballet performed by Uliana Lopatkina since sometime last November, so I had a lot of pent-up anticipation, along with a little nagging voice in the back of my head telling me that most certainly we were going to have a rehearsal scheduled at the last minute. That didn't happen, and so I found myself in the theater, buying a paper copy of the program and cracking it open to read the name of the performer written at the top of the list just to make sure I wasn't imagining things.

The performance was everything I could have ever wanted. Uliana Lopatkina has a magnetic energy that pulls the attention of the entire audience towards her. When she came on stage, there was not a single shuffle or cough to be heard from the people watching; it was so silent, it's as if everyone had forgotten to breathe. 

The corps de ballet was nearly as flawless as Lopatkina herself. There is a good reason why the Mariisnky Ballet is known for its corps de ballet and renowned for performances of ballets like La Bayadere and Swan Lake that rely heavily on a strong corps de ballet, and this performance was exemplary of that. The Vaganova Academy, where most of the Mariinsky Ballet's dancers received their training, is responsible for nurturing dancers who may some day be ready to dance in Lopatkina's place, but also for readying the students for the many years that they will likely spend standing in the orderly lines of the corps de ballet. One of the required classes in the final year of study is a corps de ballet repertoire class, which involves learning several corps de ballet parts from classical ballets and then performing them in an exam for which grades are assigned. Everyone can debate as they wish about what ballet company is the best in the world, but it would be extremely difficult to argue that there's a company with a better corps de ballet than the Mariinsky's.

Thank you for listening to me go on and on about another visit to the theater. I just  felt that this was a story worthy of being told.