Babek is a two-act narrative ballet made in 1986 for the National Ballet of Azerbaijan, telling the story of the ninth-century rebel leader Babak Khorramdin and his twenty-two-year resistance against the Abbasid Caliphate. The article itself frames it as a "heroic Spartacus-like ballet," placing it in the tradition of large-scale Soviet narrative ballets built around a doomed popular hero, and it credits the score to Akshin/Agshin Alizadeh and the choreography to Rafiga Akhundova (with Maksud Mamedov named alongside her in the source).
What is danced
The article does not describe the choreography itself — no step vocabulary, technique, or named divertissements are given, only the plot (Javidan's death and succession, twenty-two years of guerrilla resistance, betrayal by Afshin, and Babak's execution) and production facts. What can be said with any confidence is structural: it is a full-evening two-act dramatic ballet with a designated principal role, danced at its premiere by Vitaliy Akhundov, described as winner of the Grand Soviet Ballet Contest — indicating the work was built around a virtuoso male lead in the Soviet heroic-ballet mould rather than being an abstract or plotless piece.
Context
Its own description as 'heroic Spartacus-like' points to the lineage of large Soviet dramatic ballets (drambalet) built on a rebel-hero narrative with a doomed leader, extensive corps battle and crowd scenes, and a virtuosic principal male role — a mode the article invites by name but does not itself elaborate on choreographically. Babek was made for Azerbaijan's national company at the very end of the Soviet period, by choreographers the article calls 'prominent Azeri choreographers of the Soviet era,' and its subject — a national/regional hero resisting foreign occupation — sits within a broader Soviet-republic practice of staging historical liberation epics as prestige repertory for national opera-and-ballet theatres.
Staging history
The ballet premiered in Baku at the V.I. Lenin Palace on 20 May 1986, ran for four performances there, and then entered the repertoire of the Azerbaijan State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater before falling out of use and never being restaged in Azerbaijan. It resurfaced sixteen years later when Nima Kiann, founder of Les Ballets Persans in Sweden, located the forgotten work and brought the original choreographers back to revive it for that company's world-premiere season in Stockholm — the first presentation of Azerbaijani ballet in the West since the fall of the Soviet Union.
How to watch it
Watch for the structure of a Soviet-style heroic narrative ballet: a central male protagonist carrying the dramatic and technical weight of the piece, an antagonist figure (Afshin) whose betrayal drives the plot to tragedy, and a two-act shape moving from succession/mission (Javidan naming Babak his heir) to prolonged resistance and downfall. The article gives no detail on ensemble or character-dance passages, so a viewer should treat the work's Azerbaijani/Iranian folkloric material, if present in performance, as something to verify on the night rather than assume from this record.
Credits
- composer: Agshin Alizadeh