DON QUIXOTE Comes to Warsaw in September

Performances run September 2022 - March 2023.

By: Jul. 14, 2022
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DON QUIXOTE Comes to Warsaw in September

This is one of the most important ballets brought into being by Marius Petipa, the great French choreographer who is considered the father of classical ballet. He devised Don Quixote in 1869 for the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and staged its revised version two years later at the Mariinsky in Saint Petersburg. It explores an episode from Miguel de Cervantes's famous novel and draws on more than a hundred-year presence of the theme on European ballet stages. The score was written according to the choreographer's instructions by Ludwig Minkus, Austrian violinist and ballet composer with long-standing links to Russia. Petipa's work was complemented in 1900 with new sequences by Moscow-based choreographer Alexander Gorski. For this reason, they are now both listed as choreographers of the ballet.

Early European novel verged on loose storytelling, conjuring up a universal world encompassing the human experience as a whole. Miguel de Cervantes's The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha (1605) is simple and sophisticated at the same time: the knight-errant goes from one adventure to another in a natural and organic manner. Transferring this universe into a different art form is an impossible task but you can draw different themes from it until the end of time.

Don Quixote was one of Petipa and Minkus's most successful collaborations (as was La bayadère). There is not, however, much in it left of the original mock-heroic epic. The choreographer, who also penned the libretto, decided to focus on a secondary motif - the twists and turns of the love life of Kitri, an innkeeper's daughter, and Basilio, a barber. In line with the audience's expectations and the rules of the genre which stipulated that a ballet must, first and foremost, be entertaining, Don Quixote became stunning highly amusing spectacle. The knight-errant and his servant Sancho Panza connect one visually striking scene with another, each dazzling with its display of Petipa's choreographic ideas, the magnificent Spanish flair in the dancers' movements, and various dance feats.

In 2014 the Polish National Ballet put on a new, extremely vibrant choreographic version of Don Quixote by Russian-born and Finland-based dancer and balletmaster, Alexei Fadeyechev under the musical direction of prominent Ukrainian conductor Alexei Baklan. After a few-year hiatus, the production returns to our stage under the baton of Marta Kluczyńska.

Performances run September 2022 - March 2023.




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