Dance Open International Ballet Festival will be held in St. Petersburg from April 17 to 29

From April 17 to 29, the main stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater will host the performances of the 18th season of the Dance Open international ballet festival.

The program of Russia’s largest choreographic forum includes a mixture of classics and modern dance, romanticism and avant-garde, philosophy and humor, respectability and hipsterism.

The Zurich ballet with a new resonant production by Christian Shpuk, the Dortmund ballet with a 3D performance by Mauro Bigonzetti, the Perm ballet with a fairy tale by Alexei Miroshnichenko, the Vienna State ballet with a vintage comedy and the Dutch Introdans are going to Petersburg for those who like to play with the traditions of the canons.

On April 17, the festival will be opened by the most aesthetic and discussed of recent world premieres - “Winter Way” in the choreography of Christian Shpuk. According to many critics, the new genre, which employs a unique cryptographer and hacker of modern ballet language, has nothing to do with ordinary ballet: it rather resembles spiritual practice in which the body expresses actual truths under the dictation of the soul.

For the first time, the Zurich ballet will present plastic metamorphoses on the Petersburg stage. The guests of the evening will experience the effect of frame-by-frame sliding in time: they will see dances bewitching and nightmare, fabulously attractive and painfully beautiful, deep and incomprehensible like life.

Franz Schubert’s famous song cycle “The Winter Way”, which inspired Shpuk for a choreographic walk to the borders of being, will sound in the interpretation of Hans Zehnder. The conductor, composer, music researcher of the 20th century, Zehnder actually transferred the composition of sad lyrics these days and added such a powerful degree of presence "here and now" that he could not sit still and indifferent.

This performance is for those who read abstractions easily, seek meetings with the heroes of their own dreams, and for the sake of a spiritualistic show of piercing beauty, agree to easy trolling from the other side of eternity.

April 19 Dance Open offers all children and adults a family outlet for a fairy tale: nominated for the Golden Mask National Theater Award in seven categories, the Permanent Nutcracker finally arrives in St. Petersburg.

Inspired by the most popular version of the ballet in the choreography of Vasily Vainonen (by the way, most likely, it was his adults who watched in Soviet childhood), the main choreographer and artistic director of the Perm Theater Alexey Miroshnichenko created his own story: not a fantasy “based on”, but a real classical ballet - absolutely new, but equally luxurious, theatrical and festive.

When Alex was a student at the Vaganova Academy, he danced almost all the Nutcracker games himself. And perhaps because the new production is so charged with love and warmth that the choreographer turned the work on it into a conversation with his own childhood and with those teachers whose work he always admired.

The performance was moved to St. Petersburg in 1892 - it was that year that Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote the music according to the libretto by Marius Petipa, and the second choreographer of the Mariinsky Theater Lev Ivanov first staged the Nutcracker ballet on the stage of the Mariinsky Theater.

Thin, spectacular, greedy for details scenography by Alona Pikalova and work with theatrical costume of Tatyana Noginova will transfer the viewer to the atmosphere of a St. Petersburg house on the eve of Christmas: everything here is like in old photographs - authentic, touching and warm.

In addition to the main character Marie, the play has a lot of vivid characters, and everyone, up to funny mice and amazing flowers, has their own character and dance.

Of course, The Nutcracker is a triumph of goodness and a happy ending, but you still have to get ahead of the heroes. The performance will refresh the brightest feelings, and also - children will surely fall in love with it. After all, it is about miracles that happen.

Which of us is even a little insane? We will argue about this on April 21 and 22 at the Russian premiere of Alice from the master of modern choreography, Mauro Bigonzetti, performed by virtuoso dancers of the Dortmund Ballet.

“Alice” is a choreographic fairy tale for adults with a vaccine against blues and boredom, with 3D scenography and shocking dance plastic.

The heroes of Lewis Carroll inspired, but did not force the choreographer to follow the plot of a famous story: the big reality of Bigonzetti may seem too multilayered for children. Therefore, we advise you to invite them to other performances of the season, and go to Alice yourself. Release your inner child to wander through wonderland. And let you be captivated by the balancing act and sensuality of cat dances, the electric dances of the Red Queen and the crazy technique of the Mad Hatter.

And Alice herself will tell you something very important about you. You will leave the hall completely different - more youthful, bolder and more free.

On April 24 and 25, a masterpiece of world classics - “Coppelia” performed by the Vienna State Ballet will be presented at the Alexandrinsky Theater. Despite the considerable age - almost 400 years - and the status of the world’s oldest dance brand, the troupe first came to Russia and St. Petersburg at the invitation of the Dance Open in 2015. Regular spectators of the festival remember both the choreographic set “Countdown” and the full-house “Secret of the Blue Beard” (2016) by Stefan Toss. Since then, the Vienna Ballet has been ranked as the undisputed favorite of the Petersburg public.

“Coppelia, or Girl with Enamel Eyes” first saw the light in Paris in 1870, staged by Arthur Saint-Leon to the music of Leo Delibes. This brilliant comedy has not gone out of fashion for a century and a half and does not leave the best scenes in the world. Ballet is considered the pinnacle of the work of a virtuoso Frenchman, who, as you know, managed to work in Russia. From 1859 to 1869, Arthur Saint-Leon served in St. Petersburg as the chief imperial choreographer.

The reconstructed version of Coppelia is once again brought to the world stage by the apologist and restorer of the classics Pierre Lacotte. In 1973, in the Paris Opera, he restored the original production of Saint-Leon, he restored his work in 2001 in collaboration with Albert Avelin, and most recently, in January 2019, the ballet debuted in the repertoire of Vienna.

In “Coppelia”, staged for the Vienna Ballet, everything is impressive - dancers and dances, sets and costumes, a famously twisted almost mystical plot. Do not miss: a real holiday awaits you.

The official partner of the Vienna State Ballet in the program of the 18th season of the Dance Open is Raiffeisen Bank.

On April 27, Introdans, a dance brand from the Netherlands, will complete the tour program of the festival. The triumvirate “Masters” will be presented by Niels Kriste with the one-act ballet “Singing”, Hans van Manen with “Polish Pieces” and Caetano Soto with the grotesque “Conrazoncorazon”.

Why do people fight and do not know how to negotiate?

What is beauty and how, embodied in dance, in language, in music, does it help us get closer?

Whose orders are more valuable - heart or mind, and how to understand another and live in peace on a common planet?

Modern choreographic texts are already waiting for a new generation of interpreters.

The highlight of the season will be the Dance Open Stars Gala. The program of the evening, which will be held on April 29, will traditionally include fragments of recognized masterpieces, as well as the latest experiments performed by bright dancers of our time.