Ballet

Members of the State Opera Ballet

The Ballet Company

The ballet ensemble of the Prague State Opera was established at the beginning of the 2003/2004 season by the incorporation of the Prague Chamber Ballet into the State Opera ensemble and the inclusion of new members and permanent externs. This was the start of this medium-size ensemble with Pavel Ďumbala as its appointed head. The latter, a former Prague Chamber Ballet and National Theatre soloist, acquired an extraordinary reputation during his term as artistic head of the J. K. Tyl theatre ballet in Pilsen in 1997-2003. He took over as head of the Prague State Opera ballet in June 2003 with the intention of turning it into a body capable of competing with the most prestigious domestic ensembles, both in the quality of its dancers and in its repertoire. The repertoire of the ensemble developed gradually from chamber-style evening performances presenting modern trends in dance into full-feature titles. Today, the style of the ensemble reflects all of the three main streams: classical and neoclassical ballet, and modern dance. Classical ballet in the purest Petipov form is represented by Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, choreographed by Pavel Ďumbala and Hana Vláčilová; Prokofiev’s Cinderella, choreographed by Pavel Šmok and Pavel Ďumbala, lies somewhere between classical and neoclassical style. Neoclassicism is represented by the full-length staging by Libor Vaculík of Alexandre Dumas junior’s La Dame aux camélias, of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, based on Shakespeare’s immortal comedy, or of the ballet form of Gaston Leroux’s romantic horror story The Phantom of the Opera. Modern dance principles are reflected in the first dance rendition of the entire My Country symphonic cycle by Bedřich Smetana as choreographed by Ján Ďurovčík, and in the staging of Time of Pain, whose choreographer is Bronislav Roznos, head of ballet in the German city of Zwickau.