RIKY LEVI

Riky Levi is the life story of the famous ballerina, who lived in Sarajevo before the Second World War. What was interesting in that biography is the parallelism of tragedies. Riki Levy was a very talented ballerina, but she had the tragedy of breaking her leg, so her career ended abruptly. And it all coincided with the Holocaust. Despite everything, she retained a fanatical love of ballet and a faith in art as the one that saves man from all horrors. It is the framework in which the ballet takes place.

I came into contact with the story of Riki Levy quite by accident: the director of the Sarajevo Ballet was Slavko Pervan. We knew each other from Zagreb (...). Pervan wanted an author from Croatia for the ballet Riki Levy. That's how I got the chance (...) While working on the ballet music I accidentally met Mrs. Petrovic, an ethnomusicologist who filmed old people who kept old Jewish musical tradition in synagogues in Israel. Contact with Jewish music helped me to realize many musical and ritual situations in ballet. (…) The ballet was premiered on the eve of the 1991 war. At that time, a great troupe of Russian dancers was performing in Sarajevo.