NEXT in the season of live satellite broadcasts from the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow to the big screen at the Regent in Christchurch is Le Corsaire, on Sunday March 11 at 3pm.

Based loosely on Byron’s poem, this lavish production with music from Adolphe Adam is almost ballet’s answer to Pirates of the Caribbean. Le Corsaire has been a Bolshoi favourite since 2007, when Alexi Ratmansky restored and refined the choreography. Medora, a young slave girl, has been sold to the evil Pasha.

She is then kidnapped from the Pasha’s palace by Conrad, a swashbuckling pirate chief. The ballet contains magnificent set pieces from moonlight over the Mediterranean to thunder and lightning and the shipwreck.