How do ballet dancers today cope with traditional choreography like Petipas?
Raymonda’s choreography is very challenging, even by today’s standards. They may have been less concerned in Petipa’s day about precise positions and placement than we are now, but they only gave the roles to dancers who were strong enough to do them and the training in St. Petersburg was very good. They just did it. Now we’re very preoccupied with perfect turnout and placement, but sometimes lose the joy of dancing the steps and the details in the head and arms. I spent many hours — and so did Irina Kolpakova — with the head and the arms and the subtle movements and nuances like head inclinations and the eyes. The dancers today do it more or less intuitively but don’t always get it right. It rarely comes naturally because that part of the training isn’t there for the most part, so I had to choreograph it for them. That can be very time consuming. One dancer in Helsinki had that schooling and it was already in her body. She was the exception. If you have a corps de ballet that’s sys
