Experience a true ballet classic with richly spectacular set design and exotic choreography
La Bayadère is much more than a grand visual masterpiece. It is also a ballet whose choreography is infused with the spirituality and exoticism of India – not to mention an elephant measuring over four metres!’
A bayadère is an Indian temple dancer who entertains with singing and dancing for special occasions. In La Bayadère, the temple dancer’s name is Nikiya, and she is at the centre of a fateful love triangle.
The high point of La Bayadère is the celebrated and magical third act, The Kingdom of the Shades, where an endless stream of dancers garbed in cloud-white tutus emerge from the darkness and float in unison across the stage, almost like a Buddhist mantra. A purely symphonic act with choreography as exceptional as the Dance of the Cygnets in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.
When Marius Petipa presented the Russian ballet in 1877, the action was set in ancient legendary India, but this version takes place at the end of the nineteenth century, when India was a British colony under Queen Victoria. As in most Romantic ballets, the real world has a counterpart in an alluring parallel universe – here, the upper-class world of the British Raj juxtaposed against the otherworldly realm of the ethereal bayadère.
