by Natalia Di Bartolo – Tchaikovsky's Ballet at the Massimo Bellini Theater, with the State Company of Georgia, directed by Nina Ananiashvili.
It can happen that in life, fairy tales and experiences come together: so it was that one day many years ago, a five-year-old girl, who had long wanted to attend the Classical dance school which at the time was a flagship of the Massimo Bellini Theater in Catania, happy then to be ready to follow the courses, asked her mother: “But what color will my tutu be?”; and her mother, moved, replied: “Of all the colors you want and what your character will be…You can even have a black tutu!”. The little girl was impressed, she who had always dreamed of white tutus made of feathers and tulle with delicious crowns of flowers in her hair. She didn't like the news, but her mother was right: she had mentioned it specifically Odile's famous black tutu, the evil lookalike of Odette, protagonist of “Swan Lake by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, one of the greatest classical ballets ever written.
As she grew up and continued her studies, the little girl realized that wearing the black tutu was a dream goal; wearing both, black and white, in the same show would have meant becoming a prima ballerina. And since then, despite having taken different paths in life, the figure of the ballerina with the black tutu remained in her imagination cloaked in a particular charm.
The black tutu of the beautiful and wicked Odile, to Massimo Bellini Theater in Catania, 24 January 2024 was worn, along with the white one, by the diaphanous and beautiful dancer Nino Samadashvili, from the prestigious Ballet of the Tbilisi State Opera in Georgia, first Imperial Theatre, founded in 1851, one of the oldest in Eastern Europe, today directed by the very famous star Nina Ananiashvili, former prima ballerina of Moscow Bolshoi, awarded with countless international prizes and recognitions.
Composed between August 1875 and April 1876, the ballet consists of four acts and four scenes. There are different versions, but the Georgian Dance Company has adopted the most famous and represented staging, from both a choreographic and musical point of view, on the revival of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov for the Balletto Mariinskij, first presented on January 15, 1895 at the Imperial Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. In the first setup Petipa he edited the first and third acts, while Ivanov took care of him white acts, the second and the fourth, or those where fantastic and ethereal characters dominate, represented in the costume by white tarlatana or tulle dresses: the famous tutus. There new choreographic version presented in Catania de “Swan Lake” was staged with Aleksej Fadeechev for the company in 2005 and revisited again on a musical level in 2016.
People inevitably recognize themselves in this choreography, where the plot, however, may vary in the finish; and in this case it was a positive ending, or at least one that airs the happy ending, which, with the death of the two lovers, was not originally foreseen. Here Odette sheds its swan feathers; the spell of the cruel mago Rothbart, who forced her, together with her innumerable companions, to appear during the day in the guise of the white bird, breaks for the love of principe Siegfrid and the two lovers are united forever in the fateful meeting of souls and bodies.
In reality, the original plot involves a tragic ending, which over time has been imaginatively altered, but kept tragic: the two lovers should succumb to the cruelty of the spell. Here, however, love has triumphed, after so much suffering and deception on the part of the magician who gave it to his own sister Odile, the swan with the famous black tutu, the appearance of Odette to cruelly deceive the prince.
An evening of great music, first of all, in Catania, nell’very crowded before, sold out, of the genius' ballet Tchaikovsky, con the stable orchestra engaged in the performance of a score that was defined at the debut of the ballet “complicated and different from usual” and which is still great, apart from some cuts, evidently foreseen by the revision. A note of praise to the magnificent four Horns ed all’Arpa of orchestral team from Catania, directed for the occasion by M° Papuna Gwaberidze.
The set design ultra-classic by Vyacheslav Okunev, with the luci di Srteen Bjarke and the staging rich and also equipped with nice costumes they fascinated the Catania public, who gave warm applause to the entire dance troupe, in which delicate and numerous dancers stood out in a row and in which, as always happens, the performance of the four little swans who danced holding hands was highly applauded , in sync.
In classical ballet the moment of the moments is also beautiful applause, warm and heartfelt, to the soloists, the conductor and the ensemble Dance troupe, including conductor. Everything as expected, but, for once, understood by the little girl of the time, now rich in experience of Art due to her age and cheering in the front row, it was a pleasure to lose herself in the fairy tale, at least the one on stage.
Natalia Dantas ©
Photo by Giacomo Orlando ©