Мариус Петипа — choreographer / dancer с корнями из Russian Empire
Marius Petipa was born in Marseille in 1818 into a theatrical family — his father was a dancer and ballet master — and began performing in his father's touring company as a child. He worked in Nantes, Bordeaux and Madrid, studied in Paris with Auguste Vestris, and by his late twenties had a modest reputation as a dancer and none at all as a choreographer. A private scandal in 1847 made remaining in France awkward; his brother Lucien, who knew the Russian theatrical world, made enquiries in Saint Petersburg on his behalf.
The timing suited both sides. The Imperial Theatres were spending heavily to draw French ballet masters and ballerinas to Russia, and needed a strong male lead. Petipa arrived in Saint Petersburg in May 1847 and made his debut two months later in his own restaging of Paquita. He remained with the company for the rest of his life — some sixty years.
His rise was gradual. He danced and taught at the Imperial Ballet School through the 1850s while choreographing in the shadow of Jules Perrot and Arthur Saint-Léon, and his breakthrough came with The Pharaoh's Daughter in 1862. He was appointed chief choreographer in 1869 and Premier Maître de Ballet of the Imperial Theatres in 1871, a position he held until 1903.
In those decades he produced more than sixty full-length ballets and a great deal of shorter work, composing from detailed written plans drawn up in advance with his designers and composers. The classical repertoire performed worldwide today is substantially his: La Bayadère (1877), The Sleeping Beauty (1890), Don Quixote, Raymonda (1898), and the 1895 Swan Lake staging made with Lev Ivanov that superseded the ballet's unsuccessful premiere. The Nutcracker was choreographed by Ivanov to Petipa's scenario.
He was required to retire in 1903, at eighty-four, after the failure of The Magic Mirror, and by his own account spent his last years in some bitterness at the loss of the theatre. He died in 1910 at Gurzuf in Crimea, aged ninety-two.
His work left Russia by an unusual route. The Imperial Ballet's régisseur Nicholas Sergeyev emigrated after 1917 carrying the company's choreographic notations, and used them through the 1930s to stage The Sleeping Beauty, Giselle, Coppélia and The Nutcracker in Britain. Much of what Western companies dance as the classical canon reached them in a set of notebooks from Saint Petersburg.
"Marseille to Saint Petersburg, May 1847; remained for the rest of his life"
История миграцииПрослеживая корни — Saint Petersburg (Russia)
The classical repertoire performed worldwide today is largely his. It reached the West by an unusual route: the Imperial Ballet's regisseur Nicholas Sergeyev emigrated after 1917 carrying the company's choreographic notations, and used them to stage the Petipa ballets in Britain in the 1930s.
Born in Marseille in 1818 into a theatrical family, he arrived at the Imperial Theatres in Saint Petersburg in May 1847 and remained with the company until his death in 1910, serving as Premier Maitre de Ballet from 1871 to 1903.
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Saint Petersburg (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.