Old-timers won't remember

Moscow was shown the art of two thousand years of aging

“Ancient Taiwanese Dances” is the oldest program of the Chekhov Festival. True, not the dances themselves of the 14th-16th centuries belong to completely legendary times, but the music that is part of the performance - Chinese scientists believe that it is about twenty centuries old. This is the so-called Nankuan (“Southern Winds”) music, brought to Taiwan by mainland emigrants escaping the Mongol invasion six centuries ago and preserved among the aristocratic community as a sign of belonging to the highest caste.

The Han Tang Yufu ensemble, created in 1983 by musician and ancient music researcher Chen Mei O, began adding dances to its programs in 1996. (These dances are called the Liyuan Opera - “The Pear Garden” - here we must remember that the Chinese call almost any movement to music, including martial arts, opera.) Since then, the ensemble has released five programs - and dance, as is typical for it, began to occupy more and more space on the stage, carefully displacing music from the center of attention.

But they brought us the first program, the one with which it all began, where the musicians and dancers are still equal and share stage time and space equally. In the original it is called “The Magnificent Festive Song” - after the first of the dances performed.

Three girls slowly emerge from the wings. There are no decorations, just some kind of golden rain overgrown with leaves hanging from the grates. What do you mean by bamboo? Or some other exotic vegetation? The girls slowly walk to the front of the stage - in fact, the whole dance consists of just this passage, leisurely turns, tiny rhythmic sways of shoulders, hips and head. At the same time, each small movement looks too sharp, separate, not flowing into another movement, but ending on its own, and after it the next movement arises. And the whole dance is not a watercolor, familiar to romantic ballet, not a drawing, typical of neoclassicism, but a perfect mosaic, assembled from a thousand pieces. To the European eye, such a dance first of all seems to be the dance of puppets - extremely skillfully made, ingeniously controlled, but still dolls. The libretto describes “The Festive Song” as the impressions of a young girl who went out into the street for the first time on a spring night - apparently, there were many impressions, since they were divided into three artists...

The second large scene - "The Hairpin Decorated with Precious Stones" - is given to a different age and a different experience. A married woman - an example of marital fidelity and correct behavior, which is specially noted in the libretto - is sad in her chambers in the absence of her husband. The maid of honor is fussing over her; he straightens her hair as she sits, consoles her, assents (the hands of the maid of honor echo the swan splashes of the heroine’s hands with the most perfect echo, the pose is the most precise mirror turned backwards); The slightly puppet-like manner of walking remained, but the hands had increased fluidity and—a strange word for the thinnest female hands—strength.

The subsequent musical part of the performance is more pleasing to European ears in those fragments where the rattles click out an amazing rhythm than in those where piercing strings pry the nerves as if with a steel hook. Most of the melodies still become a test for curious people who want to find out how it all sounded in Asia two thousand years ago. But the audience, already accustomed to exotic guests at the Chekhov Festival, greeted the finale of yet another educational program with sincere (and generally relieved) applause.

Anna GORDEEVA