I’ve always thought Marius Petipa’s choreography for the character dances in his 1877 La Bayadère would look at home on the music hall stage. So when Phil Chan suggested that we collaborate on a reimagining of this revered but problematic ballet warhorse, originally set in a fantasy India, I hoped we’d settle on an early-twentieth century setting. After discussing a variety of scenarios, we landed on a backstage drama—a show within a show—one of the favored narrative structures of American musical theatre. Phil immediately identified the congruence between Bayadère’s love triangle of Nikia, Solor, and Gamzatti and that of Singin’ in the Rain’s Kathy Seldon, Don Lockwood, and Lina Lamont. This led us to our reimagined plot, a comedy (!) featuring an up-and-coming ingenue, her fiancé, and the reigning star of the Silver Screen. Nikki (Phil’s new name for Bayadère’s Nikia) would be our star on the rise.

The Gershwins’ 1930 musical Girl Crazy, which made stars out of Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers, has long been a favorite of mine with its dude ranch setting and terrific musical numbers. I was thrilled, then, that Phil was as game as I was to set most of the ballet’s dances as part of a cowboy-themed film being shot throughout our show, In short order, Bayadère’s opening ritual dance became a Campfire Waltz, the “Djampe” scarf number became a Cactus Dance—its performers wielding riding crops—and Petipa’s lavish Badrinata festival was transformed into a Rodeo Parade. Bayadère’s iconic Kingdom of the Shades scene called for special attention and a contrasting approach. We’ve made it the “dream ballet” of our show—an art deco fantasy inspired by the over-the-top creations of Busby Berkeley.

We knew the score by Ludwig Minkus would need to be adapted to deliver the sound world of a vintage musical. This particular combination of symphony orchestra and jazz band is epitomized in the work of Robert Russell Bennett, the orchestrator of choice for most of the era’s tunesmiths. From the beginning, I had the wonderful vintage musical specialist Larry Moore in mind and hoped I could convince him to take on the project and give the score a Robert Russell Bennett treatment. Larry had worked on a reconstruction of Girl Crazy in the ‘90s, and I knew he’d be perfect for Star on the Rise. To my delight, he was more enthusiastic than I could have hoped, and we spent a happy nine months in 2023 working together as he adapted the score from period sources and sent me scans of his handwritten manuscripts, which I dutifully computer-set to create a full score, parts, and piano reduction. Larry worked from two Imperial-era rehearsal scores, one for two violins and another for piano. We breathed sigh of relief as we found that Minkus’s waltzes, polkas, and galops transformed easily into tangos, beguines, and Charlestons. The new orchestration for the Dreamland scene (Larry’s apt new title for the Kingdom of the Shades) was inspired by Bennett’s glamorous settings for the Astaire-Rogers hit film Swing Time.

I’ve approached Petipa’s choreography for Bayadère based on the various ways the steps have come down to us. Nearly all of the ballet’s ensembles dances and a few solos were documented using the Stepanov choreographic notation system in connection with Petipa’s revival of Bayadère in 1900. Nikolai Sergeyev, a dancer in the St. Petersburg Imperial Ballet who later became rehearsal director and an important ballet stager in the West, was the notator. His work is now housed at Harvard University. (The ballet’s mime script, also copied by Sergeyev, and Petipa’s own preparatory notes are held in Moscow archives.) In setting the dances, I’ve followed the notation closely, although we’ve allowed ourselves some latitude in the upper body (and occasionally in the legs and feet) to help place the choreography within our new narrative context. 

Some numbers that aren’t notated have been handed down by oral transmission, from dancer to dancer. For these, we’ve consulted the earliest films we were able to locate—usually mid-twentieth century black-and-white excerpts from Bayadère. Here, we’ve allowed ourselves additional freedoms in the staging, particularly where the “traditional” choreography seems not to represent ballet step vocabulary or structure that was common around the turn of the twentieth century. In the case of the adagio from the pas d’action in the final scene, we’ve created new choreography drawing on many inspirations. Likewise, the dances for the fakirs in the opening scene—undocumented and by early accounts demeaning and exoticized representations of Hindu religious thought to possess miraculous powers—have been replaced by choreography for our band of cowboys. For these passages, we looked to other cowboy-themed dances in the American repertory for inspiration, especially those by Agnes DeMille (Oklahoma, Rodeo) and George Balanchine (Western Symphony). (The cowboy roles are a composite of Bayadère’s fakirs, the young boy students in Petipa’s Badrinata festival scene—this choreography is shared with our young Buckaroos—and the ensemble in Bayadère’s "Hindu" dance.)

We’ve reassigned several dances as well: Pamela Zatti, our Gamzatti character, performs Nikia’s vina (guitar) number in the opening scene, its music reimagined as a tango; Nikki performs the "Manu" dance in the Rodeo Parade scene, a moonshine jug replacing the milk pitcher of the original; and Pam and Sol (our Solor) dance the leads in the frenzied “Hindu" dance, here rechristened as Bronco Busters, another nod to Girl Crazy. The "Lotus" dance in the ballet’s finale scene was choreographed by Petipa for 24 student girls and provided us with a particular challenge because our resources didn’t allow for this cast size. Our solution has been to set the dance for six young students joined by six Rancher men from the IU Ballet Department, and we have adapted the choreography accordingly. We’ve also included a non-Petipa dance that has become part of Bayadère’s performance tradition—the 1948 interpolation for a character originally called the “little god,” better known today as the Bronze (or Golden) Idol. Finally, with Larry’s encouragement, we’ve replaced the ballet’s apotheosis, depicting Nikia and Solor flying through the mist over the Himalayas, with an upbeat Charleston finale that befits the uplifting ending of our new story. Structured in the manner of a Petipa coda, the number features the entire ensemble dancing to the strains of a jazzy, reimagined melody from the Kingdom of the Shades.

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The entire IU Ballet Department, especially its wonderful students, approached this project with generosity, openness, and enthusiasm. I sincerely thank them all. 

February 2024