La Bayadère

La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer) (; translates to English as Bayaderka) is a ballet, originally staged in four acts and seven tableaux by the choreographer Marius Petipa to the music of Ludwig Minkus. La Bayadère was first performed by the Imperial Ballet at the Imperial Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, on . A scene from the ballet, known as The Kingdom of the Shades, is one of the most celebrated excerpts in all of classical ballet, and is considered to be one of the first examples of abstract ballet.

La Bayadère has been restaged and revived many times throughout its long performance history, most notably by Marius Petipa in 1900, for the Imperial Ballet; Alexander Gorsky and Vasily Tikhomirov in 1904 for the Bolshoi Theatre; Agrippina Vaganova in 1932 for the Kirov Ballet; Vakhtang Chabukiani and Vladimir Ponomaryov in 1941 for the Kirov Ballet; Rudolf Nureyev in 1963 (the scene The Kingdom of the Shades) for the Royal Ballet; Natalia Makarova in 1974 (the scene The Kingdom of the Shades) and the full-length work in 1980, both for American Ballet Theatre; Rudolf Nureyev in 1992 for the Paris Opéra Ballet; and Sergei Vikharev in 2001, in a reconstruction of Petipa's 1900 staging.

Today, La Bayadère is presented primarily in two different versions—those productions derived from Vakhtang Chabukiani and Vladimir Ponomaryov's 1941 revival for the Kirov Ballet, and those productions derived from Natalia Makarova's 1980 version for American Ballet......
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