God will provide

A ballet about Martin Luther is being shown in Moscow

The Salyut cultural center is first by metro to Skhodnenskaya, then five stops by trolleybus. The press secretary of the Dmitry Bugaev Ballet theater assures that summer shows in the capital suddenly appeared in the theater’s schedule - all the free stages suitable for dancing were already occupied by someone else. The premiere of “Martin Luther” was played in Finland in March, then there will be a Kiev tour, and this traveling theater was going to be in Moscow for Christmas. But plans changed, and we had to stay in the hall that we managed to rent.

“Ballet of Dmitry Bugaev” is actually one of hundreds of small touring companies that perform stripped-down versions of classical ballets in provincial cities. A specially staged performance for such a troupe is a categorically atypical phenomenon; no self-expression is expected in such theaters; people earn money. But “self-expression” was not the main thing here either: Bugaev composed the ballet not because he wanted to do something new specifically in choreography. A couple of years ago he became a supporter of the Lutheran Church and now decided to tell the biography of its founder. On the official website of the theater, the story of a wonderful dream that the choreographer had in all seriousness is stated, and it is stated that “God provided the project with funds.” But let's leave aside miraculous events - they are beyond the competence of a ballet critic. Let's take a look at the performance itself.

At the center of the story are three characters. Martin Luther himself (a young man in a gray cassock with an overworldly expression; the role went to Sergei Chumakov), the Angel of Light (of course, the girl in white - Ekaterina Shalyapina) and the Angel of Darkness (black suit and ominous makeup; Anton Domashev). Luther's rich biography has been cleaned up and leveled out: thus, in the play there is no hint of the situation that arose at the time of the peasant uprising: the fearless reformer, as is known, called on the authorities to harshly suppress the protests of the unruly scum. But this story would add unnecessary specificity to a performance that only marks some milestones in Luther’s life. Fragments of his biography are just a background for the hero’s eternal battles with the devil and no less long duets with the Angel of Light.

The Devil is strong, expressive and bright - Anton Domashev is generally an excellent artist, it is not clear why and by what wind he was carried away a couple of years ago from his native Musical Theater to the entrepreneurial steppes. The devil alternately flops along the ground and then arches in a movement full of interrupted, limited striving forward (impulse - but the body goes backwards, the leg thrown forward sharply bends at the knee; he is all like a bow trembling with impatience, from which aggression is about to break and power). In the choreography there are clear traces of the text given at one time by Yuri Grigorovich to the Evil Genius in “Swan Lake”: he also threads his hands into the armpits of the person he is pursuing, and also copies his movements.

The dances of the Angel of Light are quite expressionless; She keeps extending her arms over Luther, and he carefully carries her. The hero himself was given a set of classical steps, mixed and piled up: at the moment of his vow (the hero was caught in a thunderstorm and swore that if he survived, he would devote his life to God), a specially effective lightning flashes, and Luther either spins in the air, or jumps around the stage - - just like some Basil from Don Quixote. The dull text becomes more cheerful only at the moment when Luther arrives in Rome: there the action stops, and jesters and village women dance happily on stage (Leonid Lavrovsky must be shaking his head in heaven, recognizing Verona from Romeo and Juliet). But what happens after the hero returns to Germany is impossible for a person unfamiliar with the details of the reformer’s life to understand without a libretto. So the devil keeps throwing some kind of scroll at him, and the Angel of Light pulls Luther away by the shoulder. It turns out that this is not just some abstract temptation - it is a papal bull excommunicating the hero from the church. But some characters in scarlet wide-brimmed hats are spinning around Luther, bending like mice in “The Nutcracker,” and then leaving in a crowd into the wings, he is in the middle of the crowd. Frankly, it seemed to me that the hero was arrested (I read the libretto after the performance). No, it was apparently he who was surrounded by the Electors, who refused to obey the pope and outlaw the German translation of the Bible...

Despite all this, this is not hackwork at all, the dancing people are trying, everyone’s eyes are shining, everyone believes in their work. But the complete helplessness of the choreography makes us hope that the author will further glorify God in some other way. After all, the road paved with good intentions leads you know where.

Anna GORDEEVA