La Bayadère

La Bayadère is one of the grandest and most visually spectacular of all the nineteenth-century classical ballets, a tale of love, jealousy, betrayal and transcendence set in an imagined ancient India. Created by Marius Petipa and first performed at the Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg in 1877, the ballet follows Nikiya, a temple dancer (bayadère) who is destroyed by the jealousy of Gamzatti, the princess her beloved warrior Solor has been compelled to marry.

The ballet's most celebrated sequence — the Kingdom of the Shades — is one of the most iconic passages in all of classical ballet. In this dreamlike vision, Solor, opium-addled and grief-stricken, imagines the realm of the dead where the shade of Nikiya and the shades of countless other dancers descend in an endless arabesque promenade down a ramp shrouded in mist. The cumulative effect of these repetitions — twenty-four, thirty-two, or even more dancers executing the same undulating phrase — creates an almost hypnotic sense of infinity, and represents Petipa's choreographic genius at its most sublime.

The Royal Ballet's production, staged by Natalia Makarova based on the original Petipa choreography, offers a lush and theatrically satisfying full-evening work. The role of Nikiya demands a dancer of rare lyrical beauty and dramatic conviction, while the role of Gamzatti requires regal authority and formidable technical command. Together they form one of the great rivalries in the ballet canon.

La Bayadère stands as a defining expression of the Imperial Russian style and a vital pillar of the classical repertoire, combining sumptuous spectacle with passages of transcendent, otherworldly beauty.