One of the classic ballets in the traditional Western musical repertoire, which here appears in a version by the Víctor Ullate Ballet Company of the Region of Madrid.
The first version of this ballet was choreographed by the French stage designer Marius Petipa to music by the Austrian composer and violinist Ludwig Minkus, and was performed in the Bolshoi Imperial Theatre in Moscow in 1869. Ullate created his own version in 1997, in which he sought to maintain the spirit of Petipa's original version and of the later version by the Russian choreographer Alexander Gorski.
The innovations introduced by Ullate involve, in his own words, a certain 'Spanishification' of the original ballet. Thus the production features the Spanish guitar, the gypsies who appear in the second act were actual local Spanish gypsies, and the character of 'Cupid' is reverted to his original masculine state.
