Larisa I. Abyzova

The article studies the cases of a choreographer's appealing to the topics of the 18th century. This issue rarely becomes the subject of scientific research to cover the features of Petipa's work with the material that was widely recognizable and had its stage representation typical of the second half of the 19th century. These ballet performances included all the inherent features, such as the structure of the action, operating with complex choreographic forms, large diversity in the part of the main performer. Later the choreographer's activity resulted in elaborating the traditional 'canonical' representation. The analysis of Petipa's contribution to ballet theater led to proposing a hypothesis that the choreographer was one of the creators of the 18th-century theatrical myth and developed the very principle of aesthetic perception of history among the audience: the stage image he shaped later became generally accepted. The article studies the notion of recognition, which is especially relevant for the ballet theater. It allows the viewers to perceive what they see and to correlate the received impressions with the well-established images of the past typically evoked in a representative of the second half of the 19th century, i.e., isolated from the epoch by a sufficient temporal distance. For the choreographer brought up in the French tradition, as well as for their Russian audience, a sense of historical authenticity is combined in one production with 'variations on a rococo theme'. The authors analyse Petipa's performances created over four decades, which inevitably rely on historical materials of the 18th century, from the early one-act ballet "The Parisian Market" (1859) to one of the last creations, the pantomime "The Heart of the Marquise" (1902).