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Prague Dances
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16897 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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4 / 1990 |
2,030 Words |
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Leland Windreich
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Prague has never been a mainstream center for dancing. Like every other European city it supports a theater in which opera shares the stage with ballet, both offering popular European fare (Italian, French, and German grand opera and nineteenth-century ballet classics) as well as a nationalist repertoire of works created by Czech composers and choreographers. Modern dance and more stringent, experimental forms have not been widely developed, but multimedia theater has made great achievements at home and has become a characteristically Czech export for international fairs.
Vladimir Vasut's main occupation is a profession unknown in the Western dance world - that of a librettist. The need for such a specialist reflects the interdependence of drama and dance in Czech theater. A suave, slender fifty-eight-year-old native of northern Czechoslovakia, Vasut is of Hungarian parentage. He studied at Prague University and the Academy of Arts, becoming a charter member of the Prague Chamber Ballet's artist staff when it was formed in 1964. He also works as a dance specialist at the Prague theatre Institute, writes monographs on the history of Czech dance, and serves as Prague correspondent for Dance Magazine.
Vasut has written the entry on Czech dance for the forthcoming International Encyclopedia of Dance. Ballet, he notes, has been part of Czech theatrical life since the Renaissance, but it gained prominence only in the last century with the emergence of the National Theatre and the appointment of Czech ballet masters. Ballerinas were imported from Italy, but ballets on Czech themes began to emerge, offering contrast to the works borrowed from the French and Italian repertories. After 1918 and the formation of the Czech Republic, a wave of modernization took place, obviously influenced by the dazzling success of the Diaghilev Ballets Russes. The dance arts achieved stature through improved teaching methods imported from the Soviet Union, and ballet began sharing status with opera. It was in Brno that Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet was first shown to the world in 1938. Today there are active ballet establishments in twelve Czech state theaters.
Since the advent of communism in 1948, ballet has flourished in the state theaters, but its content has remained within a traditional framework. Over the past five years the ballet repertoire at the National Theatre has favored evening-long dramatic ballets, offering new productions of such traditional favorites as Swan Lake, the Pierre Lacotte restoration of La Sylphide, and a new version of Leo Delibes' Sylvia by the Hungarian choreographer Laszlo Seregi. There is also a version of La Fille mal gardee staged by the Cuban ballerina, Alicia Alonso.
"Modern" ballets invariably deal with literary or dramatic themes, giving contemporary Czech composers a chance to compose long-winded scores. Recently Macbeth was turned into a ballet by choreographer Daniel Wiesner, who combines expressionistic dance elements with ballet, using a sound-collage score by Vaclav Riedlbauch. Ballet-master Miroslav Kura created another epic with Labyrinth, inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy. State theaters in Brno and Ostrava, following Prague's lead, have turned out ballets to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Taming of the Shrew. A double bill at the National Theatre of Stravinsky's Firebird and Petrouchka, in versions devised by Czech ballet masters, is a token gesture to the twentieth century in a country where the Balanchine legacy has offered few temptations - given
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