On the Kulikovo field

Maya Krylova

Boris Tishchenko’s ballet “Yaroslavna”, first set in 1974 in Malegot Oleg Vinogradov and Yuri Lyubimov, today only theatrical old -timers remember. And at one time, the performance of “Word of Igor’s Regiment” was produced by a splash. And how not to produce: not too familiar to the Soviet ballet theater (you can’t put any pas de de), it was combined with the directing of the fashionable semi-speaking leader of the Taganka. Yes, and the usual susal in the interpretation of the image of the protagonist was not observed - especially in Tishchenko’s original plan: the second name of the ballet was an “eclipse”.

“I read the original. And I realized that this was not an epic, not a heroic drama, but a real tragedy! <...> I say: “We will do the opposite of it. Igor is not a hero, but a real criminal, <...> an upstart, broke off with his detachment and went, the reconnaissance regiment of the Polovtsy came across, and they easily defeated him, so much they also began to bridge the bridges, what is there, and to squeeze the girls of the Polovtsian. Marroders!” Marroders! ” <...> I say: “What is it? Heroism? The Russian people are a hero of anything?” (From an interview with Boris Tishchenko).

Tishchenko wrote not a smooth-extended anthem, but a hard-oratoria ballet, in which two choirs-male and female-are explained by quotes from the “Word”. The music is harnessed for a long time, but it goes quickly: it is specially stomping on the spot, suddenly throbbies the shocks of the “explosions” reaching hysteria, or stretches a deliberately dreary gimp with an ominous bundling of violin backgrounds, a thump of drums, whistling “waves” of spiritual and sharp variable sizes and fins. Through this dense haze, roll calls with ancient Russian chants and their refraction among composers of the twentieth century are visible.

The author of the New Mariinsky "Yaroslavna", the young choreographer Vladimir Barnava, managed a lot by his 29 years. Behind it are two “golden masks”, victory at the contest of young choreographers “Context”, cooperation with the theater Ahe, Maxim Didenko and the Monte Carlo Ballet troupe-plus a successful “parsley” in Perm and several opuses as part of the creative workshop of young choreographers at the Mariinsky Theater. And now - also an invitation to a full -length production from Valery Gergiev. Maestro himself, not the first year promoting Tishchenko’s music, stood behind the remote control at the premiere. The orchestra, I must say, sounded impressive-from the first, long, drilling (to the limit of patience) the sound of a flute-piccolo to the final choral "prayer".

What did Barnabas do in these conditions? He invited the playwright Konstantin Fedorov, with whom he wrote a new libretto-about the sophisticated (personified by the inner demon) of the ruler-little boy, whose dreams of light glory with weapons in his hands literally gain blood and flesh. About the hero turning around the anti -Herrier. And about what is heroism: overtaken stubbornness or the ability to recognize mistakes? The score was the starting point for the fantasies of the choreographer: Tishchenko Barnabas does not fight with music, but not almond.

Barnabas curiously begins the performance: Igor (Yuri Smokalov) sits on the handle of a huge sword, all in dreams of heroic glory, and in the backdrop, in the theater of shadows, the attackers of the hero and the won, the wild boars, cerebral cerebrals and snakes of Gorynychi, flash. Statics will end with the appearance of a diva (Grigory Popov): the tempter will find the use of dreams, literally manipulating Igor’s body and give free rein to his vanity. And now, Igor, as a wound, hits himself with his palm in his heart, swearing at something assertive and playing with muscles: for the hero, as Barnabas says, “war is easy and simple, this is generally a holiday. After all, he still does not know what war is. ”

“Visibility” is generally a keyword for understanding the author’s plan, even if the creators of the Mariinsky “Yaroslavna” implied a figurative meaning (by no means always readable). It is so important for the director to convey an anti-war idea, it is so necessary to shout to the public that the invented parade of cultural codes comes out with naive-flazing, almost teenage in their passion. But at the same time - in the spirit of the local, grotesque theater, equalizing the times and era in rights: Igor’s squad in the campaign is accompanied by a submarine in the steppes, and the eclipse crawls with a giant black circle itself with a common quote from film fiction.

The sword is visible - a fetish, a phallic symbol that took possession of the attention of the masses (another symbol is the coat of arms in the form of a crucified pterodactyl skeleton). Conditional saints are visible in costumes of the color of the fading sun, which camps on the corpse of the murdered in the strife. You will not confuse the militaristic games that turn into a pagan rite with anything. The scenes with the Polovtsy are also visual: the feast turns into an orgy of cannibals with severed enemy heads on expensive dishes-and Igor, who has lost his friend, becomes clear that there is still a difference between training and performance.

Mariinskaya "Yaroslavna" - half ballet, half pantomime. Igor depicts the owner of life, and in the final, having seen enough of the ghosts of the dead soldiers, like a forced son, in repentance, pushed by his wife, falls to his knees in front of the city and the world. Yaroslavna (Zlata Yalinich), initially opposed to the window dressing, first clings to him, and then writhes in the grief, crossing like a herring with bare feet and dramatically rolling in a large golden circle - either a heavenly sign, or a wheel of fate. The "animal" of the cor deburlet of the lanes Plastically echoing the violence over the captive girl, who fights off the soldiers with large batman - firing legs into the air. Other Yaroslavna characters are simplified by Barnabas almost to the sign (the soldier’s stitching in swimming trunks and helmets, which causes rugbites in memory, Romans from the Spartak ballet and the film “Star Wars”), or are expressed by the passes of the hands and facial expressions of the face.

You can understand why the crowd of militarists was given a simple dance: for the same reason why street boys do not speak the professor. But at other moments, the unwillingness of Barnabas to the maximum to use the potential is not necessarily classic - the troupe of the Mariinsky Theater seemed strange. However, if the choreographer had the task of creating a minimalist plastic ballet with non -nimmalist music, he achieved this. But sometimes it seemed that Tishchenko, but Glass, would have approached such a sight more.

Sofya Dymova

After "Yaroslavna. The eclipse ”in the Mariinsky and Perm“ parsley ” , set shortly by the same team ( Barnabas - Solodovnikov - Fedorov ), the audience reacted the same way - jumped from the chairs and made it in a sweet languor. In both performances, something was discovered that the audience had long and passionately expected. The point is not even that in the Mozartian figure of Vladimir Barnabas, a ski choreographer was thought, which would withdraw domestic choreography from a prolonged crisis. (Honestly, it was bored with writing about this: the crisis, so as not to wait for the Messiah, but quietly take off the shavings behind the workbench.) From the Cloarid conversations, it is clear: in the dilogy “Parsley”/“Yaroslavna” the audience attracted the lack of false pet to a certain abstract classic. I liked that both performances were made very fun. The style of Barnabas was identified as a platform theater, contrasting it with the annoying Balanchin-Formal Classical ballet. The choreographic method was described as minimalism and both performances were credited to the category of contemporary art.

The problem is that the word “minimalism” ( which most often means a rehearsable technique of musical composition ) applies to everything that is little, confusing the conscious self -restraint of the artist with a small vocabulary. It is not at all surprised that the observers gave themselves to deceive and took the scandalous of the scandal of the choreographic text for minimalism.

For Kitch, Yaroslavna is not at all luxurious, for Campa is not eccentric and not serious enough.

You will have to ask very naive questions. What is ballet-let not classic, but very, very modern? A naive answer once: a way of organizing space and time. Two naive answer: a performance where the conflict is pumped and resolved by purely plastic (dance) means. In Yaroslavna, the dance text, due to its ineffectiveness, cannot carry the dramatic function (injection and resolution of the conflict). In other words: on the stage they almost do not move or move outside the conscious lexical system, outside of any bodily philosophy.

The load falls on an abundant props: a multi -meter sword, a huge mirror circle, a table with foam sausages, luminous swords in the hands of soldiers. With each object, the characters are busy until the symbol is expressive (for example, the gigantic sword - the first thing the viewer sees “Yaroslavna”) does not lose any meaning: ten minutes are hidden in a row on the stage, hugged in lusts, they are dangerously flying up on it in an embrace with the blade and finally take the dead warrior in the pose of crucifixion. The passion of the choreographer for such “work with the subject” is genetically connected with the performances of Maxim Didenko, with whom Barnabas has been cooperating for a long time: already in the Senkovsky “Konarmia” and “Earth” such episodes left an unpleasant aftertaste of student plastic sketches for endurance.

We are not at all against the classic Par Excellence , which has a colossal physical resource, the troupe of the Mariinsky Theater dancing barefoot and in non -transient positions - perhaps such a change in the language will benefit her. We even know examples of ballets with a propulsion and without choreography: this is how all the last major works of Alexander Ekman are done. The fundamental difference lies in the fact that Ekman, who is related with Barnabas, the ability to effectively put theatrical dust into the eyes, unlike the St. Petersburg choreographer, always lies up complex rhythmic score. For three acts, Yaroslavna suffers from the absence of rhythmic will-the sluggish plastic machine of the performance threatens every second to stall: some extended Enchaînements , that is, ligaments of movements, are not built, the multi-figured cor debular moves with a continuous knitting mass without the choreographer attempts to structure this mass in space and time. Such arrhythmia is amazing against the background of fried, tense to a cramp, rhythmically and timbro with the chlobe of music by Boris Tishchenko.

In Yaroslavna, the second time after Parsley, a stylistic collapse occurred: an expensive plan with a cheapness of execution. From the cabinet of the world pop culture, a chaotic pile of carnival characters fell on the stage: there are multi-colored bearded lords from computer games, soldiers dressed up by players in rugby, girls in sequins with lemon ni hairs and skills of super-forthers. For Kitch, Yaroslavna is not at all luxurious, for Campa is not eccentric and not serious enough, and here is one of the three - or an orgy with silicone striptrases, or foaming sausage on a pink tablecloth, or banal classic PAs entrusted to the party of Igor (which, according to the rules of the game in modern ballet, there is ordinary cramping). The field theater or psychological theater (it is in the tradition of the latter that the performance of Igor - Yuri Smokalov is conducting). Pull the burned pancake of the moon by the rope (eclipse, naivety) or under the curtain to place fake candles (insight, spirituality) along the scene).

The carnival bustle of the performance illustrates one simple thought: the war at all times is equally meaningless and merciless. In evidence of the thesis, gypsum children from the bowl of the Stalingrad fountain, a submarine, and the skeleton of the double -headed dinosaur are taken to the stage. The point is not even that the thought is very slurred very inaudibly: it is much more important that the chosen technique of grotesque mixing is not reached, to the spectator hysteria. To be a contemporary art, “Yaroslavna” lacks the rudeness of admission and rigidity/cruelty to the look. In the end, three years earlier, the same thesis on the same scene commented on Graham Vick in the Prokofievsky “War and Peace” : the performance was rudely knocked out, but the theme of war-all-time was brought to the phantasmagoria, and after four hours of action, a motley community with a roar was brought into a bottomless gap, at least leaving, at least, leaving, at least, leaving, at least, leaving, at least, leaving, at least It is quite an artistic feeling of wild fatigue.

"Yaroslavna" is not the most pronounced. On the side of the new ballet, the actual “word about Igor’s regiment” and the score of Tishchenko remained. Although on the sidelines they talk about the new libretto, the audience was again joyfully deceived, accepting the change of costumes for the novelty: in the center there was an old conflict of meaningless massacre and shameful selfishness, and the performance does not formulate any other conflict. The gap between the chronicle source finally arose, the libretto with its clumsy imitation of the epic tale (this is when the predicate is faced with the subject: “Yaroslavna in despair. Yaroslavna ended” ), a playful visual nearby and the serious, Rigorous Partima Tishchenko. “People think: since there is a great myth, the presentation will also be great, although one does not follow from the other at all,” as Oden once remarked.

The audience has eaten the complexity of household and complexity in art and now asks for food more easily digestible.

For the innovation, you can accept the introduction of Barnava and his playwright Konstantin Fedorov of the htonic tempter of the Diva. It is pointless to personify evil in the form of a pretty pink ghoul from the point of view of the myth. From the point of view of the director-it is logical and necessary: ​​the character Div (the excellent work of Grigory Popov and Vasily Tkachenko) is a favorite mask of Barnabas himself-a trikster hero, a small demon, a carnival mockery. Diva’s phenomena are the only opportunity to expand on stage the genre of Harlequinada, who was wittily played in the chamber “passenger” and “Notes of a madman”, remaining an irresistible protagonist of his tricster show in the chamber. But on the huge rationalistic space of the “Yaroslav” alone, the harlequinade (or “damn clowning”, as the Perm “parsley”) is not enough.

Gags, generously scored in both performances, remain gags to the end-outside of any theatrical dramatic logic: they usually do not remember the chatter in the evening stand-up “Poetics” of Aristatics. Having chuckled, the public does not require more: it is enough that Prince Igor’s story at the Opera-Ballet Theater for once played without overhead beards and academic stiffness. And although the “Yaroslavna” was considered an act of contemporary art, no one was embarrassed by the absence of “increased meanings”, so desirable for Contemporary Art .

One hundred years ago, ballet critic Andrei Levinson wrote: "The worst trouble of our artistic culture is excessive frivolity, sympolism, the desire for vulgarization, for the rapid and total assimilation of superficial impressions." It can be assumed that the property described by Levinson did not disappear anywhere over the past century, but only aggravated in connection with the changes of the sociocultural climate. Judging by how Parsley and Yaroslavna met, the aesthetics of Just for Fun are again in demand: in other words, the audience has overstated the complexity of household and complexity in art and now asks for food more easily digestible. That is why eyewitnesses of ballet prime ministers in Perm looked at the intellectual calculations of Alexei Miroshnichenko in the "Firebird", and the most complicated "large rhythmic machine" in the "Fairy kiss" Vyacheslav Samodurov.

Pushkin as a hero of the sitcom or hero of the souvenir ballet ; Socrates and Omar Khayyam as the authors of the life hut in the social network-nothing that the rivers attributed to them were never pronounced by them; “The Word about Igor’s Regiment” as “Pro -PECTORISHILTO”. It is impossible to blame the choreographer of the fact that he wants to appeal to the audience, let everyone at once, and the viewer asks him to leave him alone with the “objective laws of the composition” and cultural stereoscopy - and just give a rest. And it is possible that today, against this background, attempts to seriously talk about rhythmic lack of will and art are appropriate as a preaching at a party.