Oleg Dark. Telo Taglioni

Entrance hall

Have foot you seen a cast of Anna Pavlova's ? The leg is abnormal. Akim Volynsky said that the instep of Pavlova’s foot is so great that she does not dare to stretch it out completely, so as not to break it 1 . These wonderful legs of Pavlova did not have what in wild ballet language is called eversion . The foot turned inward on its own . Then Pavlova stopped trying to support her leg and turned upside down. When the tutor saw Pavlova’s new arabesque, she was horrified. Come on, said Pavlova, I still won’t succeed. line of striking beauty and purity Thus was born Pavlova’s . The line was admired, not suspecting that it arose from a deficiency and ugliness .

about ugliness Yuri Tynyanov spoke source of new forms . as the driving force of art, the “Ugliness” here is any “mistake”, “irregularity”, violation of the “norm” (genre, kind). Tynyanov meant the ugliness of man-made works.

The connection between the work and the author’s body (step and foot ) is known. Perhaps deviations from the norm in an artistic creation result from physiological “errors” in the structure of its author. Rhyme loses precision or disappears, rhythms are interrupted and confused, colors are mixed, lines and volumes are disrupted, cantilence disintegrates because the author does not hear, does not see, does not notice. This biologizing assumption is precisely applied to dance, where one's own body is the material itself. His original abnormality gives birth in dance to a new, unprecedented body.

Adazio

The women called young Maria Taglioni “the little hunchback.” In an evil letter from a contemporary, an almost monstrous image of Taglioni appears: “From the crown to the waist, this is one person; from the waist to the toe, another”... That is, he is no longer a person. Centaur? "Large feet that do not belong to the body (again! the body is crushed and divided - O.D.), which keep bending; and all the time she bends her legs (she will crouch and take off, instead of simply jumping) and generally pretends to be , that jumps ... Deceives the entire audience here" 3 . Letter - March 1832 Three months and several days since Taglioni made her debut in the role of La Sylphide (March 12).

Pavlova also “deceived the audience” by turning her foot towards the floor and creating her beautiful line . “But this is precisely what delights the public” (from the same letter of 1832) Art is always a deception: it “pretends” that it has the same thing as we have (words, sounds, movements, figures), only more beautiful , and are subject to our assessment. But in our world these words, principles and creatures do not exist. Ugliness is something we don't have and shouldn't have . It’s not for nothing that the hunchback traditionally evokes horror.

Taglioni's hands. They were ugly . It is possible with both stresses in the word. These hands had no image outside of the dance . These hands were pure material, like all of Taglioni. And how she experienced the fact that she was only material, we will never know. Dance is silent, poetry is more chatty. From the poems of poets you can learn how to experience the fact that you are only material. Most lithographs from Taglioni show the same hand position. One at the shoulder - awkwardly, uncertainly, as if she had been looking for a place for a long time, and the other was strangely thrown away - there was no place for her.

These arms - a sign of Taglioni's dance - were so prohibitively long that they "brought the father into despair" - Philip Taglioni, his daughter's cruel tutor and ballet director for her. His “sorrowful cries,” preserved by a witness of his lessons: “What can I do with these hands! Lower, bend, cross them!” There is a search - poses, positions. They were found - strange, incredible, impossible before: awkward, almost involuntary, forced, poses of helplessness and uncertainty.

These simple-minded hands (Slonimsky: “simple-minded steps” by Taglioni 4 ) concentrated in themselves what was carried by her entire appearance created by the dance : the randomness of her existence and the impossibility of it here, the awkwardness of the fact that she found herself here. this awkwardness She (or her heroine) felt . Here the madness is not bacchanalian, splashing out, but a quiet madness of falling out and detachment, when everything around is seen as if through a film. And in Taglioni’s body, what was touching (because what do we care about the sylph’s experiences) was the strangeness, almost unbearable, of all existence. So what are we doing here? Taglioni's hand is to the shoulder.

In all the stories about Taglioni, her amazing, striving, long jump and hover constantly and very naturally and imperceptibly takes on the character of languishing pain and joylessness. This is a "leap into illness", according to Kierkegaard . Or, on the contrary, dance, like philosophy, is born from illness, according to L. Shestov . (It’s interesting that there is almost no myth at all about the old and, it seems, not very good character Taglioni. This is natural. There are no old ballerinas.)

The material for the same awkwardness, uncertainty, instability was provided by Taglioni’s entire painful body - disproportionate, very thin, uneven and agitated, smeared with white, producing this strange trembling ( a trembling arabesque 5 Taglioni) and taking it out (ballet term) from reality. By eliminating sensuality and posing from dance, Taglioni replaced femininity with a more complex attractiveness. Her masculine jumps blurred gender boundaries in the dance. She was a yearning, almost sexless creature, not a woman if only because she was not fully human.

Variation

It is believed that the ballet "La Sylphide" was created based on the novella by Charles Nodier "Trilby" (1822) . But in the ballet everything seems to be deliberately turned upside down: a charming short story about the triumph of love has turned into a dance about its impossibility. All images of air, fire, etc. virgins in different genres after the ballet of F. Taglioni (Mary's father) went back to that first, ancestral image. Including in the story “ La Sylphide ” by our V. Odoevsky (1837). It can be said that these stories and repetitions were memories of Taglioni .

Nodier's novel ends with the death of the heroes, but also with their reunion. This is a very solemn, operatic and joyful ending. In the ballet of Taglioni's father and daughter - dying, and I don't know anything sadder and more touching. Nodier's tiny brownie loves a beautiful boatwoman and plays with her in her sleep. The boatwoman also loves Trilby, but does not know about it and complains to her husband. A stern monk drives out a beautiful imp, promising him that if he appears, he will imprison him for a thousand years in an old birch tree in a cemetery. Trilby is back. The scene is slightly artificially transferred to the cemetery. A brownie is imprisoned in a birch tree, and the beautiful boatwoman, with the exclamation “what is a thousand years for love,” plunges into the neighboring grave.

In the ballet, La Sylphide loves the peasant James. He is the only one who sees her. In Nodier's case, the boatwoman's relationship with Trilby is a secret to those around her, an almost internal experience. In ballet they are strangely public. The sylph is invisible, but her appearances immediately cause general confusion and change everyone’s lives. But this is always the case with an unearthly creature. It violates the order : “breaking the country dance, he rushes towards her” (from the libretto of the ballet 6 ). Counterdance is a dance of couples vis-à-vis, forming two lines or squares. You can imagine how the hero ran diagonally, tearing apart the figure.

Ballet is almost elementary. There is no social difference in it, no deception and seduction, no revolution in the narrative (first the girl, then the Wilis) - as in the famous "Giselle". Just a pure, unclouded plot about the doom of a relationship with another . Sylphide and James are running from people. She introduces him to the magical forest, introduces him to the sylph sisters, but belong cannot (as they said then) to James. He tries to hug her, she slips away. An evil old witch, taking revenge on the hero, gives him a wonderful scarf to girdle the Sylphide.

The Sylphide sees the scarf, the scarf captivates her. Almost a comic duet: Sylphide takes away the scarf, the young peasant does not give it, struggle and fuss, James wraps the Sylphide in a scarf, like Isadore Duncan, the wings fall off, and Sylphide dies in the arms (only now) of the “half-mad” 7 hero. He hugs her. The witch laughs. The sylphs carry their sister away, and the little sylphs support her, “kissing her feet.” A wedding procession passes in the background: James's earthly bride is getting married. This is much more moving than the ending of Giselle, which strangely returns to Nodier. The scene at Giselle’s grave, where she immerses herself, bequeathing Albert to marry Bathilda, who loves her, who is right there (instead of the witch).

Legend associates the appearance of pointe shoes with Maria Taglioni. Volynsky associated the rise of the ballerina on her fingers with a spiritual vertical act, “overcoming nature” 8 . This strange, strange creature, created in and out of Maria Taglioni, demanded pointe shoes. began with Maria Taglioni's pointe shoes A different story .

Code

Breaking the laws of dance, with a strange body, devouring sandwiches before going on stage and taking off, 9 that is, no longer dependent on the body, the “plant-based” Pavlova was famous for her prostrate long flight. Slonimsky discovered in Taglioni's variation a long pause, noted by someone, "interrupting the movement of the jump. And this musical phrase is so expressive that it seems that you see a silhouette frozen in soaring" 10 .

“She is even unstable. There is grace, but it is not only natural, but also contrived ,” about Taglioni in the quoted letter. “The pose squints, tilts, falls... it is not held by physical effort, but by some spiritual force ,” Gaevsky about the poster with Pavlova 11 .

Mikhail Fokine said that the second edition of “Chopiniana” (another name is “La Sylphide”) was born from Chopin’s Seventh Waltz, choreographed for Pavlova 12 . Waltz - whirling, spinning, sliding: weller, wälzen, walzen. V. Odoevsky believed that fallen angels were dancing him. Pushkin called the waltz crazy - primarily in the sense of “crazy”, “taking away the mind”.

For “spinning dances” in the 16th and 17th centuries, anyone who “twirled a woman or girl too much in a dance” was still fined and imprisoned 13 . In Bavaria, until the second half of the 18th century, there was a ban on them. Probably because “as soon as they (passers-by) hear the waltz music, they begin to spin, wherever they are” (recording of a person traveling in Bavaria at that time) 14 . This is an obsession, a fascination like the one that made the peasant James rush out and break the strict square of the country dance.

Notes:

1 A.L. Volynskyi. Article au ballet. St. Petersburg, 2002. P.98

2 "...Every 'ugliness', every 'mistake', every 'irregularity' of normative poetics is - potentially - a new constructive principle." Yu.N.Tynyanov. Poetics. History of literature. Movie. M., 1977. P.263

3 L.D.Block. Classical dance. History and modernity. M., 1987. P.252

4 Yu. Slonimsky. Dramaturgy of the ballet theater of the 19th century. M., 1977. P.111

5 Yu. Slonimsky. Ibid.

6 Yu. Slonimsky. P.96

7 V. Gaevsky. Petipa's house. M., 2000. P.178

8 A.L.Volynsky. P.275

9 A. Volynsky. P.100

10 Quoted. by: L. Blok. P.248-249

11 V. Gaevsky. P.196

12 V. Krasovskaya. Ballet theater of the early twentieth century. T.1. L., 1971. P.187

13 See: M. Vasilyeva-Rozhdestvenskaya. Historical and everyday dance. M., 1963. P.183-185

14 Ibid.