Strategies for actualizing the cultural canon in Kyiv Modern Ballet’s La Traviata

Abstract

Relevance of the study. This article examines strategies for actualizing the cultural canon in La Traviata, a contemporary ballet by Kyiv Modern Ballet choreographed and staged by Radu Poklitaru (2025) based on Giuseppe Verdi’s opera. The topic is timely given the intensified rethinking of the classical repertoire in Ukrainian stage culture amid wartime conditions and profound social transformation, alongside renewed debates about cultural continuity and the place of European heritage in Ukrainian artistic identity.

The main objective of the study is to identify and characterize the artistic strategy through which Kyiv Modern Ballet and its founder Radu Poklitaru engage canonical Western European texts, using La Traviata as a representative case. The production is also considered within the broader context of Ukrainian stage reinterpretations of Verdi’s opera in recent decades. The methodology combines cultural and art-historical analysis. The article also employs a comparative approach, juxtaposing a classical work from the mid-nineteenth-century operatic repertoire with a contemporary ballet production.

The main results and conclusions. The study demonstrates that the production retains the opera’s central ethical idea—self-sacrifice in the name of love—while substantially shifting dramaturgical emphases through the condensation and reorganization of the plot, prompted by the “wordless” nature of dance and the need to externalize psychological motivation non-verbally. Musical montage (a soundtrack assembled from excerpts of different opera recordings/performances), multimedia video scenography, a carefully composed lighting dramaturgy, and unisex costuming create a new scenic coherence and articulate a three-layered structure of action: the characters’ inner world, the fragile world of love, and a cold social environment. The ballet is interpreted as an auteur artistic statement and a productive intergenre transformation of the canon that reactulizes a classical work for contemporary Ukrainian audiences.