After Petipa Analysis

Marchenkova was the raunchiest Tall Girl I have ever seen. Subtlety? Nyet! I'm not really sure what I thought about it, except that it wasn't boring. Her legs were like pistols, and she looked the audience straight in the eye: never letting them out of her grasp. She did make an effort at the style and certainly should be credited with dancing extremely big. Not even a particularly tall dancer, she certainly did everything to look like one.

Krysanova/Lopatin looked like they had walked onstage in the wrong ballet. There were no technical disasters, and Krysanova in particular is very strong, but there was no sense of dare, verve, jazz....everything was very turned out, prim and proper. There wasn't the integrity of the off-balance partnering nor the turned in emphasis on many of the steps. The speed was better maintained than I was expecting though. Lopatin was …show more content…
The NYCB and Bolshoi approaches to Diamonds could not be more different: if Diamonds is considered "After Petipa," NYCB emphasizes the "After" and Bolshoi the "Petipa." There is nothing in-between, but the steps are basically the same. In Emeralds there are often very different port de bras, and the original (gorgeous) promenade section in the first pas created on Verdy/Ludlow has since been cut in most (all?) subsequent stagings. There are also two movements today which weren't in the premiere, and the Mariinsky doesn't even dance the Death movement. The Sandra Jennings/Patricia Neary staging for Bolshoi Rubies was so altered from NYCB's it looked like a different ballet. I assume Neary's would be closest to the original, where NYCB dances the most recent version of Balanchine's before he died? However, Diamonds is very consistent from company to company, and presumably to the original. The solos in the Scherzo do tend to have variations, but they are mostly the same