A Taste for Spain

Petipa was a strong character dancer, and well placed to satisfy his audience’s appetite for glimpses of exotic, faraway places in the divertissements he embedded in his ballets.

Hungarian, Scottish, Neopolitan, Arabian: they all make appearances in his divertissements, but the constant is a Spanish dance, which appears in Swan Lake, Paquita, his reworking of Coppélia, and The Nutcracker (choreographed by Lev Ivanov, but from Petipa’s scheme)

Petipa also choreographed an entire ballet, Don Quixote, set in Barcelona.
While the style is undoubtedly classical, it has a Spanish accent: the dancers stamp, clap, flourish their fingers and throw their arms in the air.
Even the way Kitri flicks open her fan at the start of her Act III solo – sharply, right on the beat – echoes the attack of flamenco.

Don Quixote also has a fairly traditional fandango, with the dancers barely touching each other, their hands low to their hips, lunging on bent legs. It’s built on a classical scaffolding, but it retains plenty of the flavour of the “famous fandango” that entranced Petipa at a festival in Spain:

“I wore a Spanish costume, I felt just like a Spaniard, and audaciously invited an attractive Spanish woman to dance; and together with three other couples we tempestuously, madly did this characteristic Spanish dance.”

Later in the 20th-century, the story of Carmen and the glamour of Spain worked its spell on two choreographers, Roland Petit and Alonso Alberto. Alonso was Cuban, but his 1967 Carmen, commissioned by the Bolshoi star Maya Plisetskaya, had a distinctly Soviet flavour, with an off-beat interpretation of Bizet’s music by Plissetskaya’s husband Rodion Shchedrin.

The one-act ballet takes place in an arena, overlooked by watchers in tall chairs, with movement in the muscular, emphatic style of the mid-century drambalet.

Petit’s 1949 ballet, starring his wife Zizi Jeanmaire, was also inflected with the spirit of its time – Jeanmaire played Carmen in a feathered pixie cut and a sort of French-maid leotard, and the choreography is a blend of classical, Spanish and sudden contemporary moves that almost evoke mime. However, the ballerina Margot Fonteyn called it a “fiery and sensuous Carmen that was markedly more powerful than the nineteenth-century ballet pastiches flavoured with Spain like vanilla in a cake.”