Shostakovich: The Bolt, Bolshoi Ballet

Shostakovich’s ballet The Bolt is something of a rarity. Banned after its dress rehearsal in 1931, it received its first stage performance in 2005, using choreographer Alexei Ratmansky’s revamping of the plot. Bel Air’s DVD of that production is fascinating. The Bolt’s original scenario revolved around a lazy worker who puts a bolt into a factory machine, lays the blame on another worker but is found out and punished. Shostakovich and his choreographer persuaded the librettist to embellish the story with workplace aerobics, dancing machines, a drunken priest and such like. The resulting satire on factory and village life did not meet with political approval, and the ballet was banned. Ratmansky’s dazzling production is colourful, amusing, beautifully danced and, although retaining many absurd elements, somewhat more believable than the original story-line, admittedly at the expense of satire. However, I suspect unless you’re an expert on Soviet political and dance history, you’ll need to watch the accompanying interviews and read the booklet notes to begin to understand it!

About the choreographer

Alexei Ratmansky trained at the Bolshoi Ballet School before a dancing career that took him through the Ukrainian National Ballet, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet, and he was named the Bolshoi’s own artistic director in January 2004, a post he held until 2008, during which the company was twice named Best Foreign Company by the London Critics’ Circle. The Bolt was one of two full-length Shostakovich ballets he staged for the company in that period, alongside The Bright Stream in 2003; both projects were part of a wider effort to bring genuinely rare, politically fraught Soviet-era repertoire back into the Bolshoi’s active stage life rather than leave it as archival curiosities. He went on to a long tenure as artist-in-residence at American Ballet Theatre from 2009, and was named a MacArthur Foundation fellow in 2013.