Task and caress

Belgian Ballet on Dance inversion

The beginning week will be the main one for the Dance inversion festival - tomorrow the national ballet of the Czech Republic will appear at the Musical Theater (with it Mariinsky prima Diana Vishneva will appear on stage in one of the one-acts), and closer to the weekend the Portuguese will present one of their national legends in dance. Both troupes are the main theaters of their countries; the current repertoire includes the indispensable Swan Lakes, how could we live without them. Therefore, the performances brought from Prague and Lisbon to the contemporary dance festival are gestures of exception, experiments (although the composer of Czech one-act ballets, Petr Zuska, is now the head of the theater). Dance inversion began with the faithful “contemporaries”.

Before the holidays, three dancers from Burkina Faso sang their “body song” - the solidity of African dance was stripped away, thinned out by the reflection acquired by the actors over the years of work in the French company Mathilde Monnier, and it was so strange to watch an almost shamanic dance, confident in its highest significance interrupted by completely European hysteria. They were followed by the Belgians - Les ballets C. de la B., translated simply as “Contemporary Ballet of Belgium”.

"Import-Export" is directed by Koen Augustijnen to the music of French baroque composers and tells about the hard life of illegal immigrants. The scenery - containers cluttering the stage - represent the hold of a cargo ship in which four men and two women are being transported somewhere. On one of the containers there is a string quartet (Kirke, that is, “Circe”, four slightly arrogant ladies, who in the finale cannot resist breaking into a general dance). On the other, from time to time, countertenor Steve Dugarden climbs in, singing phrases of Couperin, Charpentier, Clerambault and Lambert in his angelic voice - while people at the foot of these containers fight for living space.

The move is obvious: everything is built on the contrast of divine music and earthly dirt. People are aggressive and ugly - Augustinen emphasizes this specially invented ugliness and describes it in detail in the text. Here he is helped by the fantastic capabilities of the artists - here is a dancer portraying a disabled person on crutches, almost tied in a knot, moving at a half-crawl, intertwining his supposedly lifeless legs; here is the dancer playing the unfortunate woman whom all the other travelers have begun to poison, being lifted up, she bravely collapses back like a broken mannequin.

They are all enemies to each other. And a black girl, eyes full of tears, peering into the auditorium, as if expecting help from there, at that moment when the aggressor narrows the circles around her, ironically and confidently forcing her to undress. And a funny guy, giving a nervous list of things he doesn't like in life (Lassie the dog, "what howls on TV", Pedro Almodóvar and "USA, which takes up so much space"). A real fight breaks out over a bottle of water. None of the strong will help the weak - after one of the characters is beaten to death, his body will simply be dumped into one of the containers.

But everything is not so simple - cruelty is not the only color of the performance. That bastard who was chasing a fugitive from Tanzania (the name of the country is the only thing that can be made out in her viscous song), having collected the girl’s things and moved to the far corner of the stage, suddenly sticks his face into them and begins to beat his whole body into the container, as if copulating with piece of iron - it is clear that the achieved power over the body of the victim frozen in the middle of the stage, wrapped in the unfortunate last piece of cloth, is not enough for this character. What he needs - he himself does not know; probably doesn’t know the word “pity” at all; but what we have is not enough - to the point of despair. The director's somersault - the audience begins to feel sorry for the notorious scoundrel - is a remarkably well-thought-out move by Augustijnen (by the way, he himself plays the poor scoundrel).

The world is cruel, yes. But the movement, which begins as an undoubted slap in the face, continues with a sad caress. People cannot live hating each other, and tenderness grows in the strangest, most hopeless duets. It cannot be said that Augustinen communicated anything new from the stage, but in general, fresh thoughts rarely arise in sermons. It’s also sometimes useful to repeat old ones.

Anna GORDEEVA