85 dancers who hardly touch

French ballet master and choreographer Patrice Bart from L’Opéra national de Paris has been busy working on new ballets with a classical vocabulary. Last year he crea­ted a ballet called “The Little Dancer” for Paris Opera Ballet based on the dance figures of the French painter and sculptor Edgar Degas. For Finnish National Ballet he crea­ted a highly acclaimed version of “Don Quixote” in 1997, which was a box office hit in Helsinki for many years and is returning to the stage in January 2006.

It took Bart eight years to come back to Helsinki and create a new ballet for Finnish dancers, this time on the tempestuous life and death of 19th century composer Tchaikovsky. Bart’s “Tchaikovsky” is based on the biography by French author Ghislaine Juramie with whom he has put together a concept consisting of 18 episodes – absolutely too much for a story ballet.
While the central composition in the music dramaturgy is naturally the 6th symphony, “Pathétique,” Tchai­kovsky’s ­self-portrait in music, much of the time short excerpts of many other compositions are played, resulting in a real puzzle of ­music and characters; an old-fashioned story ballet constructed with repeated blackouts and ...