Yuri Grigorovich in rehearsal: revival of The Stone Flower in the Mariinsky (July 2016)

We are delighted to share with all friends of the ballet the production of an archived video featuring choreographer Yuri Grigorovich in 2016, working on the revival of his ballet "The Stone Flower" to Sergei Prokofiev's music in the Mariinsky Theatre.

Inna Sklyarevskaya, historian of ballet:

The ballet The Stone Flower, created by the young Grigorovich at Leningrad’s Kirov Theatre (GATOB), heralded a change of the vector along which choreography would develop in the USSR.

That was in 1957. Khrushchev’s “Thaw” was already underway, for ballet too, though here the Iron Curtain was not yet ready to be raised. The Opéra de Paris had not yet come on its acclaimed
first tour with works by Lifar and, most importantly, Lander’s Études and Balanchine’s Le Palais de cristal — plot-less, like the music, and which one year later in Moscow left some in delight, others perplexed and yet more in disarray. Now that we have access to the entire variety
of 20th century world art, the radical novelty at the time of The Stone Flower does not seem so very obvious.

Prokofiev intended his ballet based on Ural tales by Pavel Bazhov specifically for Leonid Lavrovsky, the choreographer of Romeo and Juliet, collaboration with whom, back then in 1940, had been so very productive. The composer did not survive to see the premiere of the new ballet which took place in February 1954 at the Bolshoi Theatre. The Tale of the Stone Flower was not a success, it was sluggish and it did not remain long in the repertoire. And the destiny of Prokofiev’s
final ballet was connected not at all with him but with Grigorovich’s production in Leningrad.

These two productions staged three years apart show clearly how fundamentally the times had changed. It was then that Khrushchev’s “Thaw” began to filter through to ballet. At the Kirov Theatre a youth production was permitted, in which contemporary music could be used, promising young dancers be engaged and, possibly, flirt lightly with experimentation. The thirtyyear-old Grigorovich immediately brought a new expressiveness onto the stage.

First and foremost, his opus was not a magnificent drama-ballet. The plot, the action and the characters — all of that was there, but it was now all thinly veiled with so-called symphonic
dance — neither illustrative nor poetically generalised. In The Stone Flower everything really did dance with Grigorovich — everything was embodied in expressive movement: the feelings, the characters and the grotesque which played an unusually important and unusually
witty role in the ballet. This magical sensation of lightness and freshness, the subtext of which is built on an official rejection of State pathos in favour of a careful focus on mankind, on the intimate truth of human feelings and, if we take a slightly broader view, in favour of human life — all of this back then represented clear signs of a new era.

Видео Yuri Grigorovich in rehearsal: revival of The Stone Flower in the Mariinsky (July 2016) канала Mariinsky Theatre