Alicia Alonso: “Don Quixote”

The horse is a skeleton, a sculptor’s model for an equestrian monument – the rider is real. A sad, lean figure, his sidekick short and fat; when we see the pair on the stage of the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, we know this is the story of the man of La Mancha who fights windmills. The veiled lady in red velvet is the Dulcinea of our knight errant’s dreams. The music tells us we are in for an evening of virtuosity. We are in Spain, where daggers fly, the senoritas flirt with dark eyes above their fans, and men are haughty and full of themselves.

Such is the Spain of Petipa’s “Don Quixote” created in 1869, and it was this Russian fiction of “Spain” the Bolshoi’s ballet master Yury Grigorovich brought to Copenhagen 25 years ago. Now we have been given a new version, based on Alicia Alonso’s 1988 “Don Quixote” for the Gran Teatro in Havana, brought to Denmark by Maria Elena Llorente and Maria del Carmen Hechavarria. One might expect Alonso to give the character dances a more authentically Spanish style, to present the dancers with an opportunity to build plausible characters. Patrice Bart did just that, very successfully, in his version for the Berlin Staatsoper, when he asked famous ...