The first tour of the Tokyo Ballet, founded by the legendary Tadatsugu Sasaki, took place sixty years ago in Moscow and Leningrad, and passed the most rigorous test in the country of the masterpieces of Petipa’s great repertoire. The tours have now reached thirty-six, with performances throughout Europe, at La Scala as well as at the Paris Opéra, the original cradles of ballet, but also in Buenos Aires and Beijing. In Tokyo, Vladimir Vasiliev of the Bolshoi staged Don Quixote and Natalia Makarova, a sublime figure of the Mariinsky, La Bayadère. However, choreography by twentieth-century authors is also well represented in the Japanese company’s portfolio, with Kylián, Neumeier, Ek, Forsythe, and Teshigawara. The Tokyo Ballet’s repertoire also includes twenty-two works by Maurice Béjart, the demiurge of neoclassical-modern ballet who, from Brussels, shaped the postwar era worldwide. For the company, the Marseilles-born master created The Kabuki (1986), drawing on that glorious traditional Japanese total theater genre—with its stories of courageous samurai and geishas—which some young people today, bored in nightclubs, find themselves embodying, captivated by katanas, percussion, and kimonos. He later conceived M (1993) for the Tokyo Ballet, based on the life of Yukio Mishima, and personally entrusted them with The Rite of Spring and Boléro, which have made history with audiences around the world.
The self-portrait the company offers with this performance fully represents its profile: the prologue and Act I of the contemporary KAGUYAHIME, “the tale of the bamboo cutter and the Moon Princess,” by Jo Kanamori to music by Debussy, presented in Italy for the first time; alongside the classic, hypnotic Kingdom of the Shades from Act I of La Bayadère; and finally, the primordial ritual eros of the encounter between man and woman in The Rite of Spring by Béjart-Stravinsky.