© Conrad Dy-Liacco Irek Mukhamedov’s Spartacus will be performed by Hong Kong Ballet at Shatin Town Hall from Friday 25 to Sunday 27 March 2005. Earlier Ballet.co interviews with Irek Mukhamedov October 2001 July 1998 Mukhamedov in reviews HK Ballet 'Spartacus' reviews 'Spartacus' in reviews HK Ballet reviews Natasha Rogai reviews

To the familiar strains of Khachaturian’s thunderous score, the bull-shouldered figure of Irek Mukhamedov whirls and stamps as Spartacus leads the dance of gladiators and shepherds in Act 2. A flashback to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in the 1980s, when the Bolshoi made a triumphant return to London, and the 20-something Mukhamedov set the stage alight as the hero of Grigorovich’s ballet? Well, no, not exactly.

The setting is a far-from-glamorous gym at a sports complex in Hong Kong, and today’s 40-something Mukhamedov is demonstrating the steps he wants to Nobuo Fujino, the young Japanese dancer who will assume the hero’s role in the new version of Spartacus which Mukhamedov is choreographing for Hong Kong Ballet.

They are rehearsing in the gym because the studios HKB normally use have been appropriated for rehearsals by visiting companies taking part in Hong Kong’s annual Arts Festival. (“This happens every year around this time, just as we’re putting on a new production,” grumbles Stephen Jefferies, HKB’s Artistic Director.) For the dancers, this means rehearsing on a floor which is both slippery and hard (not calculated to do them a lot of good in a ballet with as much jumping as Spartacus), and changing in the toilets for want of dressing rooms.

It’s a far cry from the Royal Ballet or the Bolshoi, but Mukhamedov is taking it in his stride – he is not the airs and graces type, and his concern about the lack of facilities is on behalf of the dancers, rather than himself.

We are one-and-a-half weeks into the creation of the new Spartacus, and so far Mukhamedov is bang on schedule – Act 1 was completed the first week, and Act 2 is on target for completion in the second. One more week for Act 3, then two and a half weeks to fine-tune before the ballet’s premiere on Good Friday, 25 March.

Hong Kong Ballet Dancers Izak David Claase (left) & Chen Qing (right)
rehearsing Irek Mukhamedov's Spartacus
© Conrad Dy-Liacco

How on earth can you produce any three act ballet, let alone one on the scale of Spartacus, in just under six weeks? “It’s him - he puts me under so much pressure,” Mukhamedov laughs, indicating Jefferies. In fact, the only way to get it done within these constraints is to do a tremendous amount of advance preparation, Jefferies says. “It’s not like the Royal Ballet, where the choreographer can take 6 months to create something.” The two men have known each other since Mukhamedov joined the Royal Ballet in 1990, when it was Jefferies who coached him in his new roles. Mukhamedov had spent a couple of years planning Spartacus for English National Ballet, but that fell through, and when he heard about the project 18 months ago, Jefferies was delighted to acquire it for HKB. “The girls get lots of opportunity with all the Swan Lakes and Nutcrackers we do, but our boys are really strong, and I wanted a new ballet which would give them their turn.”

The sequence being created this afternoon shows Spartacus and his gladiators encountering the shepherds, who join them in the uprising against their Roman masters. Mukhamedov is a human powerhouse, demonstrating the steps time after time, and explaining what he wants with a constant flow of humour in his fluent, Russian-accented English. Now and then he stops and listens intently to the next bars of music with ferocious concentration, and the abrupt ebb of energy in the room makes it feel as if a massive machine has suddenly been switched off.

Despite the punishing schedule, the dancers are in high spirits and obviously enjoying themselves. They like the way Mukhamedov makes them laugh, and while certainly admiring his still-abundant ability as a dancer are not over-awed – they are prepared to ask questions and make suggestions, to which he in turn is responsive.

Watching him work, it is clear that Mukhamedov has indeed prepared thoroughly, and has a precise idea of what he wants to do for each sequence of music. As he told me, “I always have a picture of how the scene will look. I’m listening to the music all the time and the picture is clear in my head.” What he has to do now that he is working with the dancers is put in the actual steps to achieve that picture.

At the moment, to an untrained eye, things look pretty chaotic. Mukhamedov listens over and over to each few phrases of music, physically works out the steps, then gets the boys to try them out. Some of the dancers are marking, some are dancing and it is hard to see much pattern in what they are doing. As they watch, Jefferies and his Assistant AD, Wang Jia-Hong, automatically move their feet to memorise the steps, as dancers do. Disconcertingly, at this stage the grey-haired but sprightly Wang seems to get the feeling of some of the steps rather better than the actual dancers. Trying something out, Mukhamedov whirls into a series of spinning steps and a murmur of admiration rises from the watching dancers. “It is easy, easy - easy once you know the step,” he says deprecatingly. ‘Easy for you!’ is writ large on the dancers’ faces, but they keep trying and soon the steps take shape.

Irek Mukhamedov
© Conrad Dy-Liacco

Some of the Company’s female dancers eventually enter the scene, carrying outsize shepherds’ crooks (which are much bigger than they are). I assume they are shepherdesses and wonder vaguely why the male dancers greet them with slaps on the back rather than lifts or other male-female moves. Afterwards I discover that they are in fact supposed to be men (”Didn’t you guess? We’ll have to try to look more macho,” laughs one diminutive dancer, flexing her biceps), as there are not enough male dancers for Spartacus’s army. “There are only 18 boys in the company, so we have 10 extras coming in to do the Roman soldiers,” Mukhamedov tells me. “Otherwise the Roman army would be just Crassus and four generals!”

The fact that the Company currently has only 40 dancers also means that everyone other than the principals will be doing 3 or 4 roles each. Exhausting? Not too bad, Carlos Pacis, a senior soloist and himself an up-and-coming choreographer, tells me. Compared to some of the new ballets they’ve done, Mukhamedov knows how to pace things so the dancers aren’t worn out at the end of the performance. “Except Spartacus himself,” Pacis adds, “That’s a killer role.”

Given the limited rehearsal time, Mukhamedov would have preferred to prepare only one cast for performance, but with four shows in three days (including matinee and evening on Saturday), two casts will be needed, if only to prevent the stalwart Fujino being carried out on a stretcher. In fact, there are three casts in rehearsal, and the final decision on which second cast will actually appear will be taken nearer the time.

Mukhamedov intends his Spartacus to be quite different from the one by Grigorovich. For his scenario, he has turned to a novel by 19th century Italian author Raffaello Giovagnoli which is very popular in Russia, though not known to English language readers. We still have the principal good/bad quartet of Spartacus, Crassus, and their female counterparts (in this version Valeria, wife of a Roman Consul, who falls in love with Spartacus, and Evtibida, who like Grigorovich’s Aegina is the mistress of Crassus), but there are two additional characters of importance : Krieks (usually called Crixus, but Mukhamedov is using the Russian version of the name), Spartacus’s fellow rebel leader, and Valeria’s husband Sulla, whose callous murder of a young gladiator is the spark which ignites Spartacus’s revolt (and who is to be played by Stephen Jefferies, in a rare - and reluctant - return to the stage).

Hong Kong Ballet Principal Dancer Liang Jing (middle) & Hong Kong Ballet Dancers
rehearsing Irek Mukhamedov's Spartacus
© Conrad Dy-Liacco

The plot is more elaborate than the Grigorovich, and Acts 1 and 3 in particular depart radically from that version. Some scenes are inevitably imposed by the score – as Mukhamedov points out, you cannot get away from doing certain things to certain music, such as the big pas de deux between Spartacus and Valeria, the shepherds’ dance, or the orgy at Crassus’s mansion. However, he has made changes to the order of the music, and will be using some passages in new contexts. His passion for the score is evident, and while it is regrettable that for cost reasons the ballet will be performed to recorded music “At least that way we have the Bolshoi Orchestra, so the sound will be really good, the right sound for this huge music.”

The choreographic style will be less classical than Grigorovich’s, with more character-dance-based steps and more mime. For Mukhamedov, the emphasis is on what he calls body language – the purpose of dancing is to convey the feeling, to tell the story, rather than just execute the steps. What comes first in that process is the music and he frequently exhorts the dancers to listen to the music, to feel the music. “You are liberated, finally you’re free, you should feel ecstasy, joy!” he calls out, as the gladiators leap and stamp to celebrate their new-found freedom, “You must be hyper, absolutely high!”

Mukhamedov admits that it can be difficult to shake off the memory of Grigorovich’s choreography, which he danced for many years and which matches the grand scale of the music so well. However, he wants to avoid the trademark “big” Russian style where possible – this fits his concept of Spartacus himself as more human and less obviously heroic than in Grigorovich’s ballet. There will still be big jumps, but for Krieks as well as Spartacus, and the famous diagonals of huge flying leaps which epitomise Grigorovich’s super-human Spartacus are out. “Spartacus is not born a leader, he becomes a leader because of the situation. He starts to lead these people because he feels responsible, say, for the death of this young gladiator. I want to make Spartacus human, not just a hero who can fly… He’s simply standing for his own rights, his own freedom.”

After three hours or so, the sequence is finished.. It has been a long day and the dancers are starting to wind down - as Mukhamedov points out, “In the morning, the dancers are more active, they can do more, take in more, but later, say half past four, it becomes really wild – that’s when you have to really concentrate, keep it up, not relax. There’s no time to relax.” The afternoon ends with a run-through of the 10 minutes or so of choreography completed that day, to be recorded on video. Things come into focus as the dancers shake off their weariness, and take it from the top with energy and concentration. The sequence goes smoothly, and distinct stage patterns have emerged from the seeming chaos of just a couple of hours before. The big “flying” diagonals may be gone, but there are some spectacular jumps for Fujino and his Krieks, William Lin, and if the HKB gladiators are mostly smaller and lighter than the Bolshoi’s, Mukhamedov is showing that to advantage by giving them a lot of fast, compact footwork and light, bounding jumps.

Saturday 5 March

Returning to watch another rehearsal a week and a half later, I am greeted by the good news that Act 3 was completed the previous day, so the whole ballet has been done in three weeks, right on time. Mukhamedov himself seems incredulous. “My wife says I should be in the Guinness Book of Records!” He is quick to praise the enthusiasm and commitment of the dancers. “They want to do as much as they can, ”he comments, ”I can see the sparkle in their eyes – they’re not saying ‘We can’t do that’. Even when I tell them to just mark, to slow down for a while, they still dance flat out.”

Irek Mukhamedov (left), Hong Kong Ballet Dancers: Jae-eun Park (middle), Izak David Classe (right) and Hong Kong Ballet Dancers rehearsing Spartacus
© Conrad Dy-Liacco

This morning’s session focuses mainly on working with two groups of extras, 10 ballet students from the HK Academy for Performing Arts, who will form the Roman army in the battle scenes, and several children who will appear in the opening scene of Act 1.

Mukhamedov is good-humoured as ever, but begins to get frustrated with the APA students’ failure to pick things up as quickly as he expects. Language problems do not help – if the students know English, their ability to comprehend it has deserted them, and various dancers from the company help out by translating Mukhamedov’s directions into Cantonese and Mandarin. This is the battle where the slaves crush the Romans, and the 10 young legionaries are having no trouble looking suitably terrified - their difficulty is getting their entrances, exits and coordination with the other dancers right. Not so easy, especially for those only in their first year at the Academy, but after several attempts, they begin to get the hang of it.

Act 1 opens with vignettes of people on their way to the Coliseum to watch the games. The carefree play of a young boy and girl from a Roman family is contrasted with the plight of two children of a slave family, being herded through the streets by a heavily-armed soldier. In contrast to the older students, both sets of children in this scene grasp their moves immediately and act their little socks off, much to Mukhamedov’s satisfaction.

Once the extras have been drilled in their parts, there is a complete run-through of Act 2, memorably summarised by Mukhamedov as “Solo, uprising, pas de deux, orgy, battle, victory.” “And all in only 41 minutes!” says Jefferies.

The act opens with a solo where Spartacus, haunted by the death of the young gladiator killed by Sulla, decides to start a rebellion of the slaves. This is followed by the scene where first the gladiators then the shepherds join him, which I had seen being created the previous week. Today it looks like a different ballet – everything has come together, and the dancers are not only making strong, distinct patterns out of some previously messy-looking sequences, but are even starting to get that feeling of “ecstasy” at their sudden freedom which Mukhamedov was striving for. When I comment to Ballet Mistress Rashna Homji how much better it looks, she tells me to my astonishment that they have not touched that scene since I last saw it, “But,” she adds, “The dancers have been thinking about it.”

Before leaving Rome, Spartacus consummates his love for Valeria, danced by Faye Leung, in a passionate pas de deux (yes - to “that” music). Fujino has been suffering from a sprained finger, so some of the lifts were apparently curtailed, but they were still impressively complex. The two dancers are an experienced partnership, and have had a number of ballets created on them, but Leung later told me that many of the lifts were completely new to them. Although they will not be attempting the kind of huge one-handed lifts that characterise Grigorovich’s choreography for this scene, the pas de deux is far from easy, and one bit in particular is potentially dangerous, where Valeria must slide head first, facing upward, down Spartacus’s back. “He doesn’t have much time to catch my legs,” says Leung, “And if he doesn’t do it I fall on my head.” She seems remarkably cheerful about it, but then ballet is not for wimps – in this rehearsal alone, one of the girls in the corps gets bashed on the head with a crook, and Leung herself slips and falls during a solo, but they both carry on regardless.

Irek Mukhamedov (middle) and Hong Kong Ballet Dancers rehearsing Spartacus
© Conrad Dy-Liacco

After the pas de deux we get the orgy, which is my first glimpse of the Romans. Mukhamedov is very pleased with his Crassus, Liang Jing, one of the company’s most experienced principals. “I don’t need to explain to him – he understands everything about the character. When Evtibida dies, and Crassus just steps over her body as if she was nothing, he said to me afterwards ‘What a bastard!’ And that’s it, exactly.” Despite being on a much smaller scale than the Bolshoi version – just the two leads plus four other couples – the orgy looks genuinely sexy, and builds up to a strong climax (no pun intended). A danced-out Liang collapses on the floor after a relentless succession of solos and double work and calls “Massage! Massage!”. “Go on, girls,” shouts Mukhamedov, “Give him a real massage, like in Tsimshatsui!”

Not much time for relaxation, however, as no sooner have they finished partying the night away than Crassus and his generals must head out to do battle with Spartacus and his army. The battle is shaping up as an effective action sequence - the girl “shepherds” may not look much like men, but they wield their huge crooks with grim purposefulness, and the gladiators leap and kick with elan as they drive the Romans before them. Even the student extras are improving and manage to get through the scene causing only one collision. Jefferies remarks that the scene succeeds in giving the impression that there are lots of people on stage. “Yes”, Mukhamedov retorts wryly, “But then this is a small room. How will it look in the theatre?”

In the final scene, the rebels blindfold two captured Roman generals and force them to fight each other, to give them a taste of what they themselves had suffered as gladiators. The act ends with the ex-slaves celebrating their victory with the Shepherds’ Dance.

It is 1.30pm, time to stop work, and the dancers are more than ready for their weekly one-and-a-half days’ rest before starting again on Monday. “It was good, very good,” Mukhamedov tells them, then adds with a grin, “Good for a Saturday. Not good enough for performance! For performance you must be better!”

Irek Mukhamedov’s Spartacus will be performed by Hong Kong Ballet at Shatin Town Hall from Friday 25 to Sunday 27 March 2005.