A Few Words about
the First Impression
“Grigorovich’s ballet is an exceptional phenomenon, a pointer for ballet in how to portray the contemporary age which, to this day, remains a most acute problem for music theatre. The result is
all the more brilliant in that in his treatment of this most complex material, the choreographer boldly plumbs for what is most difficult. Heroic feats are an easier subject for ballet, Grigorovich
chooses the everyday. Battles are a thing of the past. The Golden Age depicts the Nep period when the remains of the old world, which had hidden, crawled out into the open and acted with refined
cunning. Having chosen the everyday, Grigorovich undermines its ordinariness with grip-pingly tense development of action. For the first time in ballet, he presents the detective genre: pursuits,
attacks and all.
...And all this in choreography which one might say is gripping in its own right: for every development in the action there are different types of dance: classical and free dance, the neo-classical and
the grotesque, 1 elements of folk dance and of the movements of sportsmen... An explosion of dance takes possession of every corner of the huge stage. Here the vortex of life itself — rapid,
variegated, riveting. Here the echoes of sporting festivities, genre ’street’ sketches, shows given by the artists of the agit-prop theatre company...In this feerie-like flow, the duets of Rita and
Boris, based on the most beautiful, high lifts, are like peaceful oases, wreathed in poetry”.
Saniya Davlekamova,
an excerpt from the first night’s review, 1982
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