Italian La Scala Theater’s Pink Floyd Ballet, which was created by choreographer Roland Petit in the 1960s following his daughter’s requests, has arrived in Istabul for the first time. The first performance is Thursday night at the Istanbul Congress Center and there will be four more performances until Sunday, featuring 13 Pink Floyd songs.
Istanbul is hosting Italy’s La Scala Theater’s Pink Floyd Ballet this weekend as part of the world-renowned show’s first trip to Turkey.
The ballet troupe makes its first performance Thursday night and will have four more performances Friday, Saturday and two on Sunday.
The ballet was produced in the mid-1960s by choreographer Roland Petit at his daughter’s request to make a ballet on Pink Floyd songs. Her request seemed impossible to him at first but later on Petit thought that it might be possible and produced the ballet.
“My daughter was then 12 years old,” Petit recently told daily Hürriyet. “One day she made me listen to Pink Floyd and asked me to produce a ballet show on its music. I told her that it was a dream but she insisted. I liked Pink Floyd but it seemed a very extreme idea to merge modern rock music with ballet composition. It was so bizarre that we could not even imagine the reaction of audiences. But we had a very big success.”
The ballet premiered in 1972 and has been traveling the world since then. Eight of the shows were joined by Pink Floyd. La Scala Theater obtained the rights for the show in 2009.
The show has been staged hundreds times around the world from Paris to Tokyo although it acquired even more high-cultural legitimacy when it moved to La Scala in 2009.
When creating the ballet, Petit attended one of the concerts of the band in London in order to talk to its members face to face and tell them his idea.
“There were 9,000 over-excited people in the concert. It made me very excited that this mass of young people, who used to listen to Pink Floyd like crazy, would see a ballet performance accompanied by this music,” he said. “We talked to Pink Floyd members after the concert and they were very excited, too. They proposed playing live on the stage [for the ballet].”
The show in Istanbul will not feature Pink Floyd live on stage but the audience will still witness a spectacular lighting and dance show.
13 songs to be performed
The ballet show has been changed twice, in 1991 and 2004, during which new songs were added to the show, while the lighting shows also underwent some alterations.
There will be 13 songs in the show in Turkey, including “Run Like Hell,” “Money,” “Is There Anybody Out There?” “Nobody Home,” “Hey You,” “One Of These Days,” “Careful With That Axe,” “Eugene,” “When You’re In,” “Obscured by Clouds,” “The Great Gig in the Sky” and “Echoes,” which will be performed twice.
The show will be on stage Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. while the two Sunday showings will come before audiences at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. Ticket prices range between 57 and 415 Turkish Liras.
Inaugurated in August 1778, La Scala Theater (Teatro Alla Scala) in Milan is recognized as one of the leading opera and ballet theaters in the world.
At the same time, the theater’s ballet company is also recognized as one of the most prestigious companies throughout the world and has featured leading dancers, including Alessandra Ferri, Roberto Bolle and Carla Fracci, at various times in the past.
Hürriyet