Summary

Bolt, Shostakovich's forbidden ballet which was never performed after its premiere in 1931, in a new scenic version by Alexei Ratmansky! In 1931, the Moscow Art Theater commissioned the young national hero Dmitri Shostakovich, aged just twenty-five, to compose the music of a ballet that should, according to the rules of the Socialist Realism, depict and glorify the values of the USSR. However, after a first performance of the ballet, Shostakovich's work – composed to a book by Viktor Smirnov – was suspected to be satirical, and was immediately forbidden. In 2006, Alexei Ratmansky created a new version for the Bolshoi Ballet. This program is the first video recording of the ballet.