From 9 to 12 October the Bolshoi Theatre of Russia will tour St Petersburg with five performances of Dmitri Shostakovich’s comic ballet The Bright Stream at the Mariinsky II. The production features leading stars of the Moscow stage. Set designer: Boris Messerer. Conductor: Pavel Sorokin. Lighting designer: Igor Deryugin.
The world premiere of The Bright Stream took place on 4 April 1935 at the Leningrad Maly Opera and Ballet Theatre, choreographed by Fyodor Lopukhov with a libretto by Lopukhov and Adrian Piotrovsky. The story of a troupe of urban artists arriving at a collective farm to perform at the harvest festival was warmly received by both audiences and critics. The ballet was soon transferred to the Bolshoi Theatre, where it was first staged in Moscow on 30 November of the same year. Among the performers were Sulamith and Asaf Messerer, Sofia Golovkina, Alexei Yermolayev and, following Lopukhov, Pyotr Gusev and Zinaida Vasilieva. Yet the production’s stage life was cut short when, on 6 February 1936, the newspaper Pravda (“Truth”) published an anonymous article harshly criticising the ballet.
The Bolshoi Theatre premiered a new production of The Bright Stream on 18 April 2003. The choreography blends a wide range of styles – from traditional pantomime to Soviet acrobatic bravura and mass-gymnastics parade. Its protagonists are not mythical beings but ordinary people, instantly relatable to every spectator. The collision between “the troupe of artists” and “the brigade of collective farmers” produces a cascade of comic situations born of simple misunderstandings. One of the ballet’s most original comic devices is its play with disguises: ballerinas dance men’s parts, while male dancers perform female roles, creating witty exercises in humor and theatrical invention.
For this staging, designer Boris Messerer chose a deliberately parodic, kitsch aesthetic. The stage overflows with colour, flowers, and sheaves of wheat, interspersed with bold slogans and posters of the Soviet era. Toy-like trains and airplanes contrast with monumental folk-art sculptures towering over the sunlit land.
Cast: 9 October – Anastasia Stashkevich, Alexei Putintsev, Elizaveta Kokoreva, Vladislav Lantratov; 10 October – Anna Nikulina, Igor Tsvirko, Kristina Kretova, Artem Ovcharenko; 11 October, 13:00 – Yaroslavna Kuprina, Egor Gerashchenko, Maria Koshkaryova, Dmitry Vyskubenko; 11 October, 19:00 – Daria Khokhlova, Denis Rodkin, Eleonora Sevenard, Vladislav Lantratov; 12 October, 12:00 – Anna Nikulina, Igor Tsvirko, Kristina Kretova, Artem Ovcharenko.
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