| “The Rite of Spring” at the Russian Chamber Ballet “Moscow” At the back of the stage there is a high gray wall. At different heights, small shelves stick out from it - just enough so that you can sit on it crouched or stand up not too freely. There are no more design flourishes, just the dancers’ feet mixing up the fine black dust (at the press conference they said so much that the stage would be covered with sand, it seemed like there would be sand dunes; in fact, nothing at all, just enough to raise a modest fountain with your foot). Over the course of thirty-five minutes, the French choreographer Regis Obadiah, invited to perform at the Russian Chamber Ballet “Moscow,” either places six dancers and six dancers against this wall, then lets them dance again. It turns out very beautiful.
The libretto by Elizaveta Vergasova is pathetic to the point of trembling: “The wall limits this soulless world, does not allow one to escape from it. But the same wall is a sign of ascent and purification, it is an exit to another dimension and the possibility of rebirth.” The performance itself is much simpler. You can, of course, attach a story to it that the action supposedly takes place after some kind of man-made disaster and that “in a frantic dance, the participants strive to free themselves from the limitations of reality.” But in fact, on stage there is simply an alternation of static pictures and fits of violent dancing; The pathos here is pictorial, not plot.
Here are six men in black trousers climbing onto shelves of different heights, freezing and forming either a staff of music or an exhibition of Simeon the Stylites. Here the girls in burgundy dresses rush to the men who have come down and clasped their hands and hang on these hands, swinging like a garland of flags on a knotted rope. Here are the men again on the wall - sitting sideways, curled up in balls. Cut to - and women are looking down into the hall, frog-like, ready to jump.
It is no coincidence that the word “frame” appears in the review: Obadiah is a classic of video dance, he was one of the first to use the possibilities of editing to create films about dance, dance films. He has been doing this for so long that, even when composing a performance for the stage, he imprints the most powerful images into still frames.
And it turns out that five couples, as if molded into the wall in a bizarre pattern, are remembered more than some plot fuss: two groups of dancers throw a man and a woman towards each other, having first torn off their clothes, and the couple rolls on the floor; not particularly interesting. Although there are beautiful ideas in the movement, they are also “cinematic”: when the men splash buckets of water on the women huddled against the wall, the fans of water are so impressive that you want to shoot in slow motion.
Ninety years ago, when Vaslav Nijinsky first staged The Rite of Spring as a story of Russian-pagan sacrifice, he amazed the French public with an experiment with movement - the performers' legs turned inward, contorted, exploding the familiar melody of dance, just as Stravinsky exploded the usual music. A child of another era, Regis Obadiah used Stravinsky as the soundtrack to a live-composed film. And Stravinsky didn’t mind. Anna GORDEEVA |
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