Back to the classics ... a dress rehearsal for Le Corsaire in Moscow. Photograph: Vladimir Fedorenko
Visiting the Bolshoi last weekend, to see the company's new production of Le Corsaire before it comes to London's Coliseum in July, I was impressed by how stubbornly tradition survives. It's been decades since the Bolshoi has ranked as a convincing showcase for the 19th-century classics, as a process of systematic - even destructive - editing, has "streamlined" the choreography of ballets like Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and Nutcracker to the point where they've ended up bearing a dispiritingly crude relationship to the original.
Now recently appointed director Alexei Ratmansky, who was ironically brought into the Bolshoi as a modernising force, has also been on a mission to regain the past. Working with meticulous ballet master Yuri Burlaka, Ratmansky has gone back to the early notation and production notes of Corsaire to try and figure out what the ballet looked like in the 1899 production of Marius Petipa. There was no intention to produce an exact reconstruction - Ratmansky does not think of himself as a museum curator - but it was a long, hard and dedicated task, driven by months of research.
The result is a shining example of history taking a U-turn, and when I talked to Burlaka and Ratmansky about it, they both independently referred to Ninette de Valois as a kind of good fairy to their mission. They both cited her guardianship of the 19th-century repertory as a shaming contrast to their own predecessors in Moscow.
This deference would have amazed de Valois herself, who back in the 1930s founded her Vic-Wells Ballet on a shoestring. There were no solid traditions to support her, no state funding, and she felt herself very much a newcomer in awe of the historic companies of France, Denmark and Russia. Yet working with the émigré Mariinsky ballet master Nicholas Sergeyev, de Valois ended up staging versions of the classics that were often more "authentic" than those produced in Russia; with the result that Ratmansky and Burlaka, products of the legendary Bolshoi, are now in turn offering reverence to her.
