AGON (G. Balanchine ; Bolshoi Ballet 2004)

Here’s my staging of AGON for the Bolshoi Ballet from 2004 with a very young Ekaterina Shipulina and Ruslan Skvortsov. He was just 21 and I think she was even younger. Yan Godovsky and Anastasia Yatsenko were the other two leads. This was quite a challenge on many levels. The company had done the ballet some years earlier but it was not a success with the audiences. The 12-tone Stravinsky music and complex choreography was definitely not the Bolshoi’s thing. The dancers really did NOT want to dance this…at first. For the first few weeks I was killing myself showing them each step full-out because they just refused to “understand” me. They even flatly refused to use counts! Eventually (I think because they felt sorry for putting me through this) they began to “get it.” Suddenly it was like a lightbulb went off and they began to actually enjoy it. Soon their teachers and coaches were coming in to watch rehearsals. Anastasia Yatsenko, who had been in the earlier corps cast, but now I had dancing the “castanet” variation, came up to me one day and told me that before, when the company first danced it, the dancers in AGON were called “the unlucky ones.” But, now they were called, “the lucky ones.” In this Pas I conferred closely with Allegra Kent (my favorite in this role) about how Balanchine wanted it danced…not just the steps, but the feeling. It’s quite dramatic when danced this way. I’m not saying this is a perfect recreation (the orchestra has some trouble…the first rehearsal they fell apart after 5 seconds, and that’s when the dancers decided to use counts) but I’m very pleased at how well the leading dancers do this. Ruslan told me to not expect any applause after the Pas, but you can just start to hear the bravos. Actually their Pas got 3 bows versus the two Zakharova had after 2nd movement SYMPHONY IN C which followed AGON. That caused quite a stir in the company. They take their bows very seriously there. This was the very first performance and I think you can tell there were some nerves, and still mistakes in the orchestra. Having danced literally all four male roles in this ballet; under Balanchine and with the NYC Ballet (I did the Pas de Deux on concerts with Allegra) I can attest that this is the most complicated and nerve wracking ballet of them all. There's a glitch in the video at the end, but you can just see the curtains are about to close at the right time.