DANCING FOR TWO VOICES

LIBRARY

I remember quite recently the irony of people who, at the timid mention of "modern dance" in a conversation, demanded immediately to substantiate its modernity. I also remember the bewilderment of the capital's spectators, whose admiration for the Queen's "Window Washer"...

I remember quite recently the irony of people who, at the timid mention of "modern dance" in a conversation, demanded immediately to substantiate its modernity. I also remember the bewilderment of the capital's spectators, whose admiration for "Window Cleaner" by the queen of German expressive dance Pina Bausch froze on the chopping table of genre definitions. From now on, the hypodynamia of public consciousness, stagnant in the battles under the columns of the Bolshoi Theater and on the ruins of the exhibition "Beware of Religion!", Is treated with the printed word. The first analytical work appeared - a book published by our columnist Ekaterina Vasenina, published by the Emergency Exit publishing house.

A few years ago, Katya began to write about contemporary dance as a form of art in itself, and reports from festivals lost in the dense province and indifferent interviews with choreographers made not only readers, but also the editor-in-chief believe in the existence of contemporary dance. Now there is a dynamic portrait of the phenomenon - in the actors.

The first book about Russian contemporary dance is a collection of interviews with choreographers, producers, organizers of dance festivals. They say Chelyabinsk and Kaliningrad, Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk, Perm and Arkhangelsk, St. Petersburg and Moscow. “Creative freedom does not depend on geography or society. She is inside the person. <…> Authenticity is authorship. Relevance is modernity,” says Gennady Abramov, head of the contemporary dance department at Yekaterinburg University for the Humanities, in an interview that opens the book.

All the characters in the collection were lucky enough to find themselves in a situation that helped them realize dancing as the meaning of life: for Natalya Agulnik, this condition was the remoteness of Kamchatka from the traditions of the mainland, for Natalya Fixsel - the liberal environment of the Novosibirsk Academgorodok, for Tatyana Baganova - the creative environment of Sverdlovsk in the early 90s .

The line of modern dance was interrupted in Russia in 1924 by a special decree banning plastic studios: without bodily enslavement, power over minds is impossible, and every story today about entering the profession, as often happens in Russia, is a story of gaining personality through gesture, tolerance through self-restraint, almost a dissident path to oneself. Makers of Russian contemporary dance know how to find money and know how to live without it, and their independence from the state turns into the fact that in Russia there is still not a single professional center of modern choreography.

But there are private schools where from childhood they are taught to live in harmony with their body and soul, to listen to them. So that the stroboscopic rhythm of the life of the “Dance, dance, dance” generation does not drag along the existential longing for identity, from the fragments of which modern man is so toiled.

Our kids climb the internet instead of trees and imitate the "simple moves" of pop idols. Therefore, the form of the book seems to be the only true intonation of the conversation - if you really need to translate the movement into words, then do not retell it, but sing it in two voices. Dance is an opportunity to find yourself and constantly change, keep pace with the times and remain a pacer. A good dancer reads the plastic means in nature, just as a cynologist distinguishes 150 types of signals in the barking of a dog.

On the map of Russian dance there is a place for Artaud's "Theater of Cruelty" and the American school of Martha Graham, modern jazz and performance, dynamic yoga and dance therapy. “In contact improvisation, it is interesting to look at the body, even when it does not move - its presence is interesting. The body is always dancing, even when it sleeps.” Talking about contact jam as a small model of the world, teacher Angela Doniy blurts out about those who decided to jump back into their bodies: “People come with TVs in their heads, but leave without.”

Farthest and “coldest” from the topic of conversation, oddly enough, are classical ballet and sports dance, where a well-balanced drawing leaves almost no room for improvisation. And the closest thing to the latest art, it seems, is antiquity, with its idea of ​​a perfect man as a beautifully organized, thinking and free body. About the cosmic nature of which we read in Mandelstam: “I was given a body / What should I do with it - so single and so mine?”.

More about the book: www.ee-records.de