L'Oiseau de feu

A danced tale by choreographer Michel Fokine with music by Igor Stravinsky, The Firebird  premiered at the Paris Opera on June 25, 1910 performed by Serge  Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. “Ivan Tsarevich one day sees a marvellous  bird, all gold and flames; he pursues it without being able to catch it,  and only succeeds in plucking one of its glittering feathers, thus  begins the libretto taken from traditional Russian tales”. But it is not  the portrait of this bird that we are going to draw, nor is it the one  George Balanchine made in 1949 based on this theme about the 1945  orchestral suite for the New York City Ballet. Stravinsky who took three  suites from his ballet in 1910, 1919 and 1945, said, “I prefer  Balanchine’s choreography for the 1945 version of The Firebird suite to  Fokine’s ballet ensemble and for the music as well – the music for the  complete ballet is too long and the quality is inconsistent” (1).

Like Balanchine, we use the 1945 concert suite, Maurice Béjart, whose  version I danced in 1979 at the Ballet du Rhin, having danced the  shorter version from 1919 at the Paris Opera in 1970. A bird of hope, or  a revolutionary icon guiding partisans wearing battledress, Béjart  explained in his foreword, “Stravinsky, a Russian musician, Stravinsky, a  revolutionary musician. […] The Firebird is the phoenix rising from its ashes. The poet, like the revolutionary, is a firebird” (2).  For our part, we should remember that birds symbolise the connection  between heaven and earth, even that the phoenix decaying to be reborn  personifies the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of Christ  in Christianity. For the rest, in his commentary on the score, the  composer Reynaldo Hahn wrote in 1910, “a very pure, very strong breeze,  coming from high above” (3). Hence the temptation to make The Firebird  a courier of light bringing consolation and hope to the hearts of men,  like Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of nature who conversed with  his brothers the birds, whether they were beautiful, radiant with great  splendour, or mere sparrows.

Source: Malandain Ballet Biarritz

More information: malandainballet.com