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An editorial in Pravda labelled it a “balletic fraud”, with its depiction of socialist peasants as “sugary paysans
from a pre-revolutionary chocolate box”.
As Judith Mackrell wrote in her biography of the ballerina, Lydia Lopokova, sister of Fyodor Lopokov, “the
only artistic crime apparently committed [by the choreographer and librettist] was to put the ballet’s cast of
farmworkers in pointe shoes, and to show them performing classical steps rather than ‘local folk dances and
games’; yet as a result, the librettist, Adrian Piotrovsky was sent to the gulag (from which he never returned)”.
Even before the premiere of The Limpid Stream, Shostakovich was out of favour with Stalin who hated his
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, an opera ridiculed by the newspaper, Pravda, as a “confused stream of sound”
filled with “quacks, grunts, and growls”. Just one week after this denunciation, Pravda went in for the kill,
describing the score for The Limpid Stream as “music without character”. Shostakovich never wrote another
ballet score.
As for Lopokov, newly promoted as director of the Bolshoi Ballet, he was stripped from the role and his
career almost came to an end.
Many years later, Ratmansky’s rescue of Lopokov’s reputati on was an important factor in his recreation of the
ballet and it’s easy to see him as a successor to Lopokov in his love of narrative, his fascination with Russian
history and social life, and his love of the work of Shostakovich.
Asked by The New York Times what draws him to the music of Shostakovich, Ratmansky said: “He’s very
Russian. You can learn the history of the country from his music. He was very sensitive, very true, even if he
had to have a mask on. Like Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, on that level of diving deep into the soul and the time.
His music answers so many questions.
“He was the child of the Russian avant-garde, super brave and grotesque, almost evil. And then in the ’30s he
went through such pressure, it crushed his self-importance. He expected arrest every night. His friends and
relatives were arrested and killed. It changed his ideas of what the artist should be”.
Although Ratmansky has been artist-in-residence at American Ballet Theatre in New York since 2008, his
choreography continues to honour the legacy of his Russian predecessors, such as Leonide Massine, who
danced at the Bolshoi before joining Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes where he carried on the Bolshoi traditions
of character dancing, mime, and comedy in ballets such as Gaité Parisienne and Scuola di ballo (the last rechoreographed
by Ratmansky for The Australian Ballet in 2009).
The Bright Stream, in particular, is built around character and demi-character roles of the kind that enlivened
the ballets of the English choreographers, John Cranko and Frederick Ashton.
Just as Ashton’s Cinderella features men in drag as the Ugly Stepsisters, and the ladies of Portsmouth in
Cranko’s Pineapple Poll disguise themselves as sailors to go searching for desirable captain of HMS Hot
Cross Bun, Ratmansky’s Bright Stream features cross dressing, a tangled web of confused identities, and a
semi-farcical plot as complex as The Marriage of Figaro and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The story unfolds against Boris Messerer’s sets of harvest produce and wheat with the ballet’s colourful
array of roles including an accordion player who chases a schoolgirl, Zina, the entertainment director of
the collective farm, called The Bright Stream, Zina’s husband, Pyotr, an agricultural student enchanted by
the visiting Ballerina, her partner, the Ballet Dancer, and an Old Dacha Dweller and his wife, titled The
Anxious-to-be-younger-than-she-is-Dacha Dweller.
Among all the carnival-like festivity and vaudevillian pranks, the leading dancers perform virtuoso solos and
pas de deux that are all the more impressive as the Ballerina and her partner dance very convincingly as the
opposite sex.
Like Maurice Béjart’s Le Concours and Jerome Robbins’s The Concert, The Bright Stream makes jokes about
ballet – its mannerisms and outdated concepts of fragile women, lovesick men and happy ever aftering. But
the only successful jokes about ballet are made by the men and women who love the art form the most.
Ratmansky is clearly among them.
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