Canada All Star Ballet Gala

 

Mind-blowing show! Only in Toronto!
Exquisite. Educational. Enlightening. Transforming.
The Most Prestigious Ballet Gala in the world!

 

April, 2018

 

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GRAND PAS CLASSIQUE

CanadaAllStarGala > GALA PROGRAMME > GRAND PAS CLASSIQUE

D. Ober. GRAND PAS CLASSIQUE

rand Pas ClassiqueAuber/Gsovsky

It takes a bit of imagination to link the dazzling Grand Pas Classique, which stands as an epitome of classical purity and precision, with Victor Gsovsky, a choreographer, who was inspired by avant-garde artistic trends of the 1920s and who introduced a decisive innovation for the traditional classical techniques. Yet in order to innovate a certain tradition, one has to grasp its essence. Viktor Gsovsky (1902-1974), a talented dancer, inventive choreographer, and extraordinary ballet master, composed his virtuoso pas de deux to the music of Daniel Auber, the nineteenth-century French composer, as an homage to the tradition, which he nonetheless thought should give way to new forms of dance. Yvette Chauviré and Vladimir Skouratov performed the Grand Pas Classique in the Theatre des Champs-Elysées in 1949 for the first time. Since then, the piece has garnered the reputation of one of the most difficult pas de deux in the contemporary classical repertoire.  It is performed throughout the whole world.

Gsovsky’s choreography continuously beguiles the audience as it allows dancers to demonstrate their energy, endurance, musicality, and elegance along with anarticulated sense of form. These qualities stood at the core of Gsovsky’s pedagogical method.  The pas de deux opens with an adagio in which the ballerina demonstrates effacéarabesques and attitudes in long balances, which Gsovsky particularly favored in his classes. In the female variation, aballerina crosses the stage doing a sequence of relevés sur pointes raising the second leg in the gradually increasing degagé in different positions for thirty-two musical beats.The male variation, no less challenging technically, demonstrates the sequence of jumps en tournant, beats, and pirouettes, in allegro ritardando tempo, preferred by Gsovsky, which calls for precise control from the dancer. The final position of the dancers in the coda is characteristic of another motif of Gsovsky’s choreography:the importance of the effacé position, which he considered more spacious and aerial than the croisé.

Victor Gsovsky, who escaped from Soviet Russia with his wife Tatiana, settled in Berlin in 1925, where he gained great recognition for his teaching method. After ten successful years in Berlin, where he worked also as a maître de ballet in the Berlin Staatsoper, Gsovsky had to flee Nazi Germany in 1936. Later, he worked with the Markova-Dolin Ballet before settling in Paris in 1938. He choreographed classical ballets for the Paris Opera and other companies, but his innovative teaching methodremains his main legacy today, which, due a great number of his talented students, became an integral part of many ballet companies in the world. His students included Yvette Chauviré, Serge Peretti, Jean Babilée, Pierre Lacotte, Lycette Darsonval, Colette Marchand, Roland Petit, and Violette Verdy, to name only the most famous.