Dubbing has historically had a renowned Barcelona school. And the versatile Barcelona actor Lluís Posada, who is part of a saga of professionals in this art, has been the voice that has given life to multiple Hollywood stars in Spanish and Catalan, from Jim Carrey to John Cusack, Owen Wilson, Leonardo DiCaprio , Johnny Depp, Ryan Gosling or Adrien Brody (in The Pianist).
This voice that is familiar to everyone will be heard this Three Kings Day at the Palau de la Música Catalana, when the Orquestra Simfònica del Vallès takes the stage (6 p.m.) with Rubén Gimeno on the podium to offer the Suite of ballet that Tchaikovsky composed for The Nutcracker. The story of this creation is fascinating: was Marius Petipa the choreographer as well as the librettist? It is said that the legendary ballet master could have started working with Lev Ivanov on the choreographic creation, but that he would have ended up being removed from the production.
Lluís Posada will intervene, in any case, narrating from the adaptation that Alexandre Dumas made of the story by E.T.A. Hoffmann The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1819), which Petipa opted for at a time when French culture felt like its own from Saint Petersburg. In this way, the disturbing and dark elements that made Hoffamnn's original a horror story were eliminated, to recreate it as a fairy tale, magic and fantasy.
The productions have been multiple. In 1919, the Saint Petersburger Aleksandr Gorski, a pioneer of dramatic realism in ballet and a reformer at the level of Michel Fokine, decided to eliminate the Sugar Plum Fairy and her knight from his choreography, assigning his dances to Clara and the Nutcracker Prince who were played by adults instead of children.
Continuing with the Russian creators, in 1954 Georges Balanchine choreographed The Nutcracker for the New York City Ballet, which continues to be performed every year in the Big Apple. In this version, the characters of Clara (here called Marie as in Hoffmann's original) and the Nutcracker are played by children, with less complex dances.
Until Mikhail Barýshnikov arrived and in 1976, two years after having defected from the Soviet Union, he created a version for the American Ballet Theater that challenged the popularity of Balanchine's televised Nutcracker. Barýshnikov also chooses to omit the Sugar Plum Fairy and Prince Koklyush, and gives his dances to Clara and the Nutcracker Prince. And he makes it so that it is not Clara's brother who breaks the toy soldier but rather an anonymous drunk who is trying to make it grow in size until it reaches human scale.
Tchaikovsky composed this piece in 1891, after the great success of his Sleeping Beauty and commissioned by the imperial theaters, and which now arrives at the Palau in a shortened version and which tries to explain the story using other artistic disciplines, be it word, illumination, narration based on the sand practiced by Borja González, with whose ephemeral visual representation it refers to the lights and shadows of silent cinema.
