Yuri Grigorovich in rehearsal: revival of The Stone Flower in the Mariinsky (July 2016)

We are delighted to share with all friends of the ballet the production of an archived video featuring choreographer Yuri Grigorovich in 2016, working on the revival of his ballet “The Stone Flower“ to Sergei Prokofiev’s music in the Mariinsky Theatre. Inna Sklyarevskaya, historian of ballet: The ballet The Stone Flower, created by the young Grigorovich at Leningrad’s Kirov Theatre (GATOB), heralded a change of the vector along which choreography would develop in the USSR. That was in 1957. Khrushchev’s “Thaw” was already underway, for ballet too, though here the Iron Curtain was not yet ready to be raised. The Opéra de Paris had not yet come on its acclaimed first tour with works by Lifar and, most importantly, Lander’s Études and Balanchine’s Le Palais de cristal — plot-less, like the music, and which one year later in Moscow left some in delight, others perplexed and yet more in disarray. Now that we have access to the entire variety of 20th century world