Corona Daily 351: Pas De Deux: Part II

Domestic performances and world tours of the ballets are generally planned 3-4 years in advance. Mariinsky and Bolshoi had plans till the end of 2022. This year, Bolshoi opera would spend a few months in France, the ballet and orchestra would perform in the festival in Slovenia, then a lengthy season in America, and the final two months in Japan. The Russian ballet has numbers that allow part of the troupe to travel abroad, while others perform domestically.

In March, when like everything else, the theatres shut; Russians were holding 7 million expensive tickets in their hands. Theatres offered them a choice of a voucher that can be used for a show in the future. Maintaining hundreds of ballet dancers and support staff is extravagant. Usually 60% of the spend is funded by the government, 40% from ticket sales and sponsors. In 2019, Bolshoi earned 2.7 billion rubles ($36 million) from ticket sales. Since April, they have been losing $3 million a month.

Ballerinas and musicians were locked up at home, in unfamiliar roles of housewives, child-carers, cooks. Alexander Krilov, a solo dancer from Bolshoi had an idea. His colleagues and he created a six-minute clip called “The Quarantine Nutcracker”. You can watch world-famous ballerinas in t-shirts and jeans, violin players playing in bed or bath, cello players wearing masks, children and dogs running around, a ballerina simultaneously dancing and cooking.

Bolshoi ballet couriered linoleum carpets to the ballerinas’ homes. They were asked to train on them, take self-videos and send to their choreographers.

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Bolshoi and Mariinsky began online concerts. These included recordings of past performances. The quality was high, viewing was free. In the first month Mariinsky had 72 million viewers, including 12 million foreigners. Bolshoi’s Swan Lake was watched by 1.3 million and sleeping beauty by 1.5 million. (In Soviet times, Swan Lake was a mourning symbol, shown on the deaths of Brezhnev, Andropov. In August 1991, with Gorbachev under house arrest, and tanks on Moscow streets, Soviet TV was showing beautiful white swans playing to Tchaikovsky’s tune.)

This democratization of elite art was a welcome result of the pandemic. Even this evening you can attend a high class opera/ballet on mariinsky.tv. However, it can’t replace the energy in the hall that inspires the performers and electrifies the audiences. If online could substitute real life, then we would watch screensavers instead of travelling.

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In May, ballet and opera theatres were negotiating with the governments for reopening. Based on scientific advice, governments were forming rules for the pandemic. Many rules were impractical. Players on string instruments such as violins, harps, cellos were asked to keep a distance of 2 meters (6 feet). The German government recommended musicians on wind instruments like flutes, horns, clarinets and saxophones to sit 15 meters (50 feet) away from everyone else. There is no orchestra pit in the world that can accommodate musicians at such a distance.

Opera singing is so powerful that an infected singer’s vocal chords can spread the virus across the stage and possibly in the stalls.

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Valerie Gergiev, a great conductor himself, and now the managing director of the Mariinsky, found a way out. On 6 June, he set up a meeting with Vladimir Putin. Putin was born and bred in St Petersburg (nee Leningrad). That helped.

Mariinsky got permission to reopen before any other theatre. Ignoring the coronavirus, its orchestra would go on a tour around Russia. From 7 July, live ballet performances would begin. The festival of white nights would be held just like every year.

(To be continued)

Ravi