International Ballet Company: The Nutcracker

04 December 2022
04 December 2022

The International Ballet Company, made up of soloists from Moldova, Ukraine, Italy and other countries, is staging at the theatre hall of the University of La Laguna (ULL) one of the best-known pieces of classical ballet: The Nutcracker, a two-act ballet with a libretto adapted from a fairy tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann.

In 1892, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the director of the Imperial Theatres, commissioned Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to compose a double-bill program featuring both an opera and a ballet. For the ballet, Tchaikovsky would again join forces with Marius Petipa, with whom he had collaborated on The Sleeping Beauty. The Nutcracker became Tchaikovsky’s third ballet and his Opus 71. It was originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. The material Vsevolozhsky chose was an adaptation of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” by Alexandre Dumas, called “The Story of a Nutcracker”. The libretto was written by Vsevolozhsky and Petipa.