Les Sílfides

The Classical Dance Department of the Conservatori Professional de Música i Dansa de Mallorca presents this program where the students perform the romantic ballet Les Sylphides and the classic repertoire of the second act of Paquita.

Les Sylphides. Single-act, classical, non-narrative ballet, with Frédéric Chopin’s music and Michel Fokine’s choreography. This means the first ballet without a plot. A young poet and a group of white sylphs dancing in the setting of a garden in a castle in ruins under the moonlight. Les Sylphides signifies a twentieth-century homage to white ballet. “Les Sylphides is featured by an exquisite subtleness and requires precise skills, capturing the essence of all the ethereal beauty of romantic ballet. Nowadays, it appears in many ballet programs as a tribute to the fragile and idealist style that influenced classical ballet for an epoch" (M. Fokine, Memoirs of a Ballet Master).

Paquita. In 1882, Petipa adapted this ballet by adding new pieces composed by Ludwig Minkus in the second act. He included Mazurka des enfants and El grand classique; a version that is still performed nowadays by many theatre groups.