Le Corsaire: A Pirate's Tale

Charlene Hall is a watercolor artist and scenic designer. She’s collaborated with Pacific Northwest Ballet for over four decades, and her painting is seen in PNB productions of Giselle, Coppélia, and George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker®. Her original scenic designs include: Theme and Variations (George Balanchine, 1985), Orpheus Portrait (Kent Stowell, 1990), Le Corsaire: A Pirate’s Tale (Marius Petipa, 2016).

Doug Fullington was Audience Education Manager and Assistant to Artistic Director Peter Boal at Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB) in Seattle. During his tenure at PNB he was responsible for developing PNB’s audience education programs and was also on the consulting staff of Pacific Northwest Ballet School as dance historian.

Doug is a fluent reader of Stepanov choreographic notation and has contributed reconstructed dances to The Daughter of Pharaoh for the Bolshoi Ballet (2001); “Le jardin animé” from Le Corsaire for PNB School (2004); Le Corsaire for the Bavarian State Ballet (2007); Giselle with Marian Smith and Peter Boal for PNB (2011), and Paquita with Alexei Ratmansky and Marian Smith for the Bavarian State Ballet (2014). Doug’s writings on Stepanov notation have been published in Ballet Alert!, Ballet Review, Dance View, and Dancing Times. He has also presented numerous lecture-demonstrations about Stepanov notation on the Guggenheim Museum’s Works and Process series.

Léo Delibes (1836-1891) was born in St. Germain du Val. As a child, he learned music from his mother, a talented amateur musician, and his uncle. At the age of 12, he entered Paris Conservatoire and became a pupil of Adolphe Adam, the French composer famous for the ballet Giselle. Delibes became a church organist, but he was drawn to the theater, writing operettas in the style of Adam, who remained a lasting influence in his life.

Renowned as a composer for dance, Delibes had a gift for illustrating action, creating atmosphere, and inspiring movement. The decisive advance in his career came in 1870, with his full-length ballet Coppélia, which includes melodic national dances, descriptive passages introducing the main characters, and musical effects that have captured audiences for more than one hundred years. His other ballets include Sylvia (1876) and also La Source (1866), which he wrote with Ludwig Minkus.

Delibes also composed operas, the last to be completed being Lakmé (1883), which contains the famous coloratura showpiece, the Bell Song (“Où va la jeune Indoue”), and the Flower Duet. His operas impressed Tchaikovsky enough for the composer to rate Delibes more highly than Brahms.

Marius Petipa (1818 – 1910) was a ballet dancer, teacher, and choreographer. Petipa is often given the title “Father of Classical Ballet,” and is cited nearly unanimously by the most noted artists of the classical ballet to be the most influential balletmaster and choreographer that has ever lived (among them—George Balanchine, who cited Petipa as his primary influence).

Petipa is equally noted for the ballets he created, some of which have survived to the present day in versions either faithful to, inspired by, or reconstructed from the original—The Pharaoh’s Daughter (1862); Don Quixote (1869); La Bayadère (1877); The Sleeping Beauty (1890); The Nutcracker (choreographed by Lev Ivanov, with Petipa’s counsel and instruction) (1892); Raymonda (1898).

Petipa also resurrected a substantial amount of works created by other choreographers which had long left the stage of other European theaters. By way of Petipa’s productions, many of these works lived on to the present day—Le Corsaire (1856, 1863, 1868, 1885, and 1899); Giselle (1850 with counsel and instruction from Jules Perrot, 1884, 1899); La Esmeralda (1866, 1872, 1886, and 1899); Coppelia (1884, 1894 with Enrico Cecchetti); Paul Taglioni’s La Fille Mal Gardée (1885 with Ivanov); The Little Humpbacked Horse (also known as The Tsar Maiden) (1895); and Swan Lake (1895 with Ivanov). There are a number of various divertissements and incidental Pas from Petipa’s original works and revivals that have survived in performance even when the full-length work did not, either in versions based on Petipa’s original or choreographed anew by others—the Grand Pas Classique, Pas de Trios, and Children’s Polonaise and Mazurka from Paquita (1881); the Venetian Carnival Grand Pas de Deux (also known as the Fascination Pas de Deux from Satanella) (1859/1870); The Talisman Pas de Deux (1889); the La Esmeralda Pas de Deux (1899); the Diane and Actéon Pas de Deux (1903/1931 in a version by Agrippina Vaganova); The Cavalry Halt Pas de Deux (1896); the Don Quixote Pas de Deux (1869); the La Fille Mal Gardée Pas de Deux (1885/1894); and the Harlequinade Pas de Deux (1900).

Randall G. Chiarelli (1949-2024) devoted his career to lighting for dance, much of it at Pacific Northwest Ballet, and also for American Ballet Theatre, Royal New Zealand Ballet, Atlanta Ballet, Houston Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, among others. His many collaborators included choreographers Donald Byrd, Mark Dendy, Ronald Hynd, Kent Stowell, Susan Stroman, and Christopher Wheeldon. Chiarelli graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in painting and sculpture.