Yuri Posokhov on the production of The Queen of Spades at the Bolshoi Theater

Yesterday ended another season of the Bolshoi Theatre. The first ballet premiere in the 2023/24 season should be The Queen of Spades. The exclusive two-act ballet, the music for which the composer Yuri Krasavin arranged based on the opera of the same name and other works by Tchaikovsky, is staged by Yuri Posokhov, the author of hits by the Bolshoi Theater – the ballets A Hero of Our Time, Nureyev and The Seagull. And although the premiere is scheduled for December 14, staging rehearsals have already been going on this summer. Tatyana Kuznetsova asked Yuri Posokhov about the concept of the future ballet, about choreographer technologies, about staging new and transferring old performances, about upcoming premieres and favorite artists.

– Did you yourself want to stage The Queen of Spades, or was this plot suggested by the theater?

– It was like this. After the premiere of The Seagull, there was a sudden call from the Bolshoi: an urgent need to make a performance by April of this year. I say: “It is impossible to write new music in such a period, I will not have time to prepare.” Therefore, I suggested The Queen of Spades – at least Tchaikovsky’s music is familiar to me. This idea stuck in my head after the tragic death of Liam Scarlett. We were on friendly terms, The Queen of Spades is one of his last performances, I saw him at the Royal Danish Ballet. There is an amazing ending, Hermann’s fantastic monologue – as if Liam had predetermined his tragic departure … But the general concept for me as a Russian person seemed strange: the countess was such a young socialite. And a desire arose in me to stage “Peak” in my own way.

– But Pushkin has a chamber history, and you are doing a two-act ballet on the Historical Stage …

— Yes, it is an intimate, psychological thing. But the theater needs a big performance – a two-act one. So screenwriter Valery Pecheikin and I come up with scenes in the spirit of the English ballet story – in England there are great masters of unfolding mass scenes from nothing.

– But what can be mass in Pushkin? Retrospective Versailles – the Countess gets the secret of the cards from the Comte Saint-Germain? Hermann playing cards?

– We have a small piece of Versailles with a young countess. But the main scene is the St. Petersburg ball, where the old woman is going with Lisa.

— Composer Yuri Krasavin has already remade the opera into a ballet?

Not only opera. There is no ball in the opera, so it was necessary to look for some other music by Tchaikovsky. Paraphrase, fit into the opera. And Yura copes with this simply fantastically, I must admit. But he already has his own “Queen of Spades”. It’s totally surreal.

Why not take his original score?

– So he wrote it to order, it, unfortunately, belongs to another theater.

– You mentioned – “young countess.” Will there be two?

– I would not like to show my cards in advance. OK. Our countess has many faces: in her youth, in relations with Hermann, on the verge of death, a ghost, a vision, a demonic beginning of life. We are thinking of personifying all these hypostases, so there will probably be several countesses. For the final, demonic image of her, I’m going to borrow a long tradition of ballet theater, when men play the infernal old women. The sorceress Madge in La Sylphide, the fairy Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty… Powerful women are traditionally represented by men in comedies: Ashton’s stepmother and sisters in Cinderella, Marcellina in Vain Precaution – by the way, Tsiskaridze is now dancing this role with great success at the Mikhailovsky Theater.

– Well, yes, for such roles, non-female gestures are needed – a different physiology, a different energy, a different range of motion.

– But we will also have female countesses – Vika Brileva, Katya Krysanova agreed to try this role.

– And the Germans – Slava Lopatin and Denis Savin? Both are such sensitive and subtle actors…

– No, we have a lot of young Hermanns. We train three or four people for each role. My old favorites, but there are new ones too. Eva Sergeenkova – Lisa. In my opinion, so far unsaid, not fully manifested, smart, very interesting. The gifted Liza Kokoreva, now she is in great demand, barely has time to visit me at the rehearsal. And the amazing Eleanor Sevenard is my discovery, I did not know her.

“She was a countess when she was young?” Secular beauty?

She is Lisa! Awesome! By what she does, how she feels, how deeply she understands everything; I have a feeling that in general the rehearsal process revolves around her.

– Will you determine the final composition?

I hope and I will insist on it. Recently, I have often been told who to choose for this or that role. But no one but me knows what the result should be, what exactly I need.

– And how many have already been delivered?

– Don’t know. This is my first time working. If earlier he made performances in pieces, and then assembled the whole from the pieces, now these are quite tiny parts. We film every rehearsal and send it “on the shelf”, to the storerooms. Then we will somehow choose from the footage.

How is the film editing? Choose the best pieces?

– Yes, there is no such possibility, everything will work out. Due to the repertoire load in the theater, it is now difficult to find free artists: every day everyone dances big performances, resorting to staged rehearsals between performances, one or the other. It is impossible to work seriously: people are not strong, they have to dance some kind of Don Quixote or Spartacus in the evening. That’s why we set it up in fits and starts – with those who came, who turned out to be free. It’s hard to do ballets like that, some kind of compromise is needed.

– During the production of “Hero of Our Time”, “Nureyev”, “The Seagull” was it different?

– Differently. I don’t know what happened. The guys get tired, some kind of fuse, excitement is gone. But it’s clear that they don’t really see their roles, they don’t understand: we put on a piece, write it down, put it off, they forget it … The corps de ballet is generally busy in performances all the time … But there’s no point in complaining. Now I have to figure out how to arrive early in the fall to finish the production. I’m still the staff choreographer of the San Francisco Ballet. Fortunately, before coming here, I managed to show the premiere of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto – according to the contract, I have to stage one one-act ballet per season.

— And how do people in the USA feel about the fact that you work in Russia?

– Well, while there is a contract for the next seasons. I have to put on a big ballet in San Francisco about the extraordinary, one might say, tragic life of Lina, Prokofiev’s first wife. The idea belongs to Tamara Rojo, our artistic director. A two-act ballet is given two years.

– Are there any other orders?

— There are plans, but not very specific yet. The pandemic has changed everything. Should put on Swan Lake in Hong Kong next spring. Own. From Ivanov I will leave the second act – for the sake of his visual beauty. And the concept and everything else still needs to be invented.

– It is, of course, easier to transfer a finished ballet. Here at the Mariinsky Theater your “Wonderful Mandarin” was staged so quickly.

– Firstly, we are with Dina and Kim (Diana Vishneva and Kimin Kim.— “b”) worked for two weeks without leaving the hall. But in general, it is only in Russia that they react negatively to renewals: “Well, this is not an original, you have already done this.” And for the choreographer, it is a great happiness that his performance continues to live – in different conditions, in a different context, with other artists. There are simply amazing actors at the Mariinsky Theater, especially Dina, who simply killed me on the spot – there is more of her in this role than me. Magic Kim is a fantastically organic, amazing artist. After the dress rehearsal, I told them: “I will not make any comments, because they contradict what you are doing. And what you are doing is so harmonious and convincing that I do not want to bring you down. I watched their performance as a spectator, was completely captivated – this “Wonderful Mandarin” is completely different from the one I did in Cleveland. And in Russia, for some reason, everyone thinks that ballets should be one-day events.

— No, everyone just wants an exclusive production.

— For exclusivity, you need to create conditions. And if there is no such possibility, then the transfer is no worse. All modern choreography in Russia grew up on translations of the Western one, but no one complained that these were not originals. In general, any production is stressful. In St. Petersburg, for example, there was a difficult situation with my contract, I don’t want to remember this. But for me the most important thing is the artists. Amazingly talented guys, girls who have an insatiable desire to dance new choreography. Desires are more than opportunities at the moment. And for the sake of them, you can go to stress again and again. And no matter how it ends, you still have to go.