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A rare and refined ballet, which ran the risk of falling into oblivion twice, is danced by the new generation of the Bolshoi Ballet, among which Nina Kaptsova et Mikhail Lobukhin. A modern and visionary work, this ballet, set to a music by Dmitri Shostakovich, was created in 1930. Its central theme was the highly moralized battle and triumph of the proletariat against the decadent bourgeoisie, set in Europe during the Roaring Twenties. Surprisingly, the score by Dmitri Shostakovich raised political controversies, probably because it borrowed much to european dance forms (and was openly inspired by jazz music) and consequently, the ballet vanished from the theaters until 1982, when Yuri Grigorovich restaged it with sets by Simon Virsaladze and a completely new libretto mainly revolving around the love story between Rita, a cabaret dancer, and Boris, an young idealist. The conflict in the original production was also recast as a clash between fishermen – the morally superior workers – and society’s criminal el
