Performance

This exceeded all expectations! Almost a half-hour standing ovation from the crowds in the audience and an endless series of sensational encores by the dancers - wrote 'the oracle' of Lodz critics, Anna Iżykowska-Mironowicz, in 1990 in the pages of Głos Poranny after the premiere of Zorba the Greek at the Grand Theatre in Lodz.

 

It was specifically for Lorca Massine - the famous dancer, choreographer, son of the great and legendary Leonid Miasin (a star of the Diaghilev's Russian Ballets) - that Mikis Theodorakis composed a kind of stage cantata (based on themes from Nikos Kazantzakis's novel) for a ballet performance, which had its spectacular world premiere at the famous Arena di Verona in Italy (1988). Lodz was then the second city to host the ballet Zorba with its phenomenal music and the final hit song remembered by all thanks to the magnificent film starring Anthony Quinn in the title role.

 

Zorba is a symbol of freedom and liberty, of inner wealth, a symbol of a man who can be good and is not afraid to be good - said Lorca Massine, and such is his stage character. Living in the present, free from the past, creative towards the future, Zorba heals wounds by dancing breathlessly, far from bourgeois morality and political regulations.

 

Mikis Theodorakis's music perfectly reflects the world of the main character, subtly combining a universal musical language with the rhythms and melodies of Greek dances, ultimately creating a form that is both traditional and contemporary, powerful and free, which gives the performance the power of communication and immerses the viewer in its narrative. For Zorba's heart beats almost in each of us.

 

...A captivating spectacle - a fragment of Renata Sas's review - emotionally engages both the stage (in many brilliant encores) and the audience. In many images of great expressive power, Massine managed to encapsulate what is the philosophy of Kazantzakis's novel - to present the power of love, hate, to embody the image of a free man in the game of feelings, to make dance a symbol of indestructible freedom and liberation. Massine so captivated the audience that the absence of a 'beautiful disaster' image so attached to 'Zorba the Greek' was certainly forgiven him.

 

This performance can count on the interest of various audience groups. Ballet connoisseurs will certainly be drawn by the magic of the choreographer's 'family' name, for others it will be an opportunity to experience the moving music of Theodorakis, and finally - those who have read Kazantzakis's novel and know the cult film version of the story of Zorba the Greek will want to see the performance.