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Performance by Joseph Naja at the Territory festival

Starting a festival of contemporary art with a new performance by Naja is a win-win move. On the one hand, Naj is a long-known and much-loved choreographer-director in Moscow (he received two Golden Masks for the best foreign performance of the season), he is considered practically a classic, conservatives have reconciled with him, his performance will not cause protests and noisy departures spectators from the hall. Thus, “Territory”, which has a reputation as a “fat” festival (this year the support of the presidential administration and the Ministry of Culture was supplemented by money from the Russian Standard Bank and the representative office of MasterCard Europe sprl), paradoxically combining glamor with scandal, will at least initially reconcile everyone. On the other hand, Nadzh, despite the fact that formally he belongs to the department of dance, is contemporary art itself, forging new paths and indivisible into genres. Drama, pantomime, visual arts, and music are mixed into his productions in such a way that it is not always possible to determine whether there is at all what is commonly called dance.

This time Naj brought his latest premiere to Moscow - the play “Intermission”, based on the Chinese “Book of Changes”. The program explained that the “Book of Changes” is one of the fundamental works of Chinese civilization and wisdom, a collective creation that was written over centuries. That Nudge relied on it poetically and structurally and that he composed the performance following the 64 hexagrams of the Book of Changes, each of which he assigned a certain theatrical micro-event in correspondence. I don’t know whether Naja’s performance should have been read like an open book by those familiar with Chinese philosophy and its main work, but everyone else, even after studying the long and vague advance notice, went to the Intermission full of joyful expectations. We remember: no matter how complex and unclear the subject taken by Nadj as the basis of the performance, the energy, intonation, expressive stage metaphors and the infectious acting talent of the director himself make the production a statement clear and open to anyone who is open and ready to perceive it. Sadly, this did not happen in Intermission.

On the platform, against the backdrop of different-sized matte screens, were four musicians in black and four dancers - three men, including Nudge himself, and one woman. On the sides of the stage there were pillars of ice: melting during the performance, they turned from white to transparent. The musicians played a composition by Akos Sheleveni, a composer with whom Naj has been working for several years. This time they came up with a new way of creating a performance, in which music and dance are composed simultaneously, influencing each other. This music, in which the main role was given to a large percussion installation, either broke up into noise, full of natural sounds, creaks, knocks, or gathered into a frantic rhythm. And along with her, the dancers either moved around the stage in an almost everyday manner, or began a feverish, broken dance with falls and desperate writhing. Then suddenly they began to do something similar to strange rituals: Nudge lowered the girl’s feet into a vessel with red paint and let her walk with “bloody” feet on a white sheet, and then he himself, spinning on a wheel, was lowered with his forehead into a pile of loose yellow paint , and when he began to dance, colorful dust flew around.

Hanging clusters of lamps flickered on and off, figures appeared behind the frosted glass of a shadow theater, animals were painted, bloody streams effectively flowed from bouquets of white flowers dipped in red paint, dancers appeared in the form of long armless figures with eyeless white heads, but that’s all This encrypted message meant it could not be deciphered. There was no energy in Intermission that previously made it possible to understand Nudge's performances above and beyond rational explanations. The performance was not only disappointing, it was disheartening due to our own inability to understand what exactly the artist, whom we had always admired so much, wanted to say. After all, remembering the joke about La Gioconda, Nudge has already been liked by so many that now he can choose for himself who likes it and who doesn’t. And it seemed that it was up to us, that if we understood the codes with which he encrypted his “Book of Changes,” then his art could open up to us as before. But this never happened.

Dina GODER