The Seagull is a ballet in two acts by Rodion Shchedrin based on the 1896 play The Seagull of Anton Chekhov. The authors of the libretto: Rodion Shchedrin and Valery Levental. [1]
Creation time: 1980.
Premiere: 27 May 1980, Bolshoi theatre, Moscow.
Choreographer: Maya Plisetskaya.
With her experience with the ballet Anna Karenina , Maya Plisetskaya created the choreography and performed the title role. After the premiere, ballet critic Natalia Krymova wrote: "Maya Plisetskaya's role in this performance is fully consistent with the spirit of the play and expresses the diversity of emotions so important to the author. Plisetskaya as a choreographer clearly professes what Treplev says: "new forms are needed." Thus, she breaks the traditional canons of ballet, replacing them with pantomime. Personifying Nina Zarechnaya, she dances only what "flows freely from the soul." Plisetskaya's dance in "The Seagull" can rightly be attributed to these words: "the life of the human spirit." A curious event occurs at the Bolshoi premiere. A woman fell asleep in the audience at the orchestra. She dreams that a gas cylinder explodes in her country house and she screams throughout the hall. Hundreds of spectators stared at her, hanging on their boxes. Everyone on stage froze, but the orchestra continued to play. And she screamed when the sound engineer very resolutely imitated a shot at a seagull.
Rodion Konstantinovich Shchedrin is a Soviet and Russian composer and pianist, winner of USSR State Prize (1972), the Lenin Prize (1984), and the State Prize of the Russian Federation (1992), and is a former member of the Inter-regional Deputies Group (1989–1991). He is also a citizen of Lithuania and Spain.
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Maya Mikhailovna Plisetskaya was a Soviet and Russian ballet dancer, choreographer, ballet director, and actress. In post-Soviet times, she held both Lithuanian and Spanish citizenship. She danced during the Soviet era at the Bolshoi Theatre under the directorships of Leonid Lavrovsky, then of Yury Grigorovich; later she moved into direct confrontation with him. In 1960, when famed Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova retired, Plisetskaya became prima ballerina assoluta of the company.
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