Those who survived

Carmen is danced at the Moscow Art Theater School-Studio

Ballet at the Art Theater? Well, not ballet - but dance, but a performance in which everything necessary is expressed by movement, and not by word? “Carmen”, where the program does not indicate the performers of the main roles, but only lists the entire course of Roman Kozak involved in the play? The Moscow Art Theater School-Studio released a non-trivial premiere.

This is not just “Carmen”, this is “Carmen. Etudes" - but not a call to be lenient towards student actors, but a declaration of the choreographer. Sigalova did not want to consistently tell the story of the gypsy woman - and she chose several main motives.

Her Carmen is not an exception to the rule; rather, “all women are like that.” The play features five girls, ten boys - and all the confrontations, hugs, and ridicule seem to be reflected in five mirrors. Each heroine has two heroes, she is either squeezed between them, or breaks away from both. A recurring motif of the performance is that men hold women by the hands, one by the left, the other by the right, and the woman either rushes forward, as if trying to break through an invisible barrier with her breasts, or is thrown back by them.

Also, Carmen Sigalova is not a story, but a state: there is no development of the image, there is a predetermined victorious grin, the ability to slide her face along a man’s forearm and instantly rush away.

And also that passion is a struggle to capture space. The men, sitting two by two on benches facing each other, approach their opponents threateningly and reluctantly move away. Moving your leg a few centimeters further is a fundamentally important achievement. And Carmen herself has her fingers spread out aggressively to the point of convulsion. And this struggle is pointless - it is through our fingers that everything flows away.

In addition, about the excitement of a man's world: well-choreographed fights. Consciously picturesque and yet completely alive.

And finally - suddenly - about youth. The fact that such intensity of passions can turn into death, or maybe (those who are older, those who survived know this) roll back, let them breathe. It is no coincidence that the green apples that the heroines gnaw at the beginning of the play and at the end are green. And when one of the heroes, frustrated by the constant slipping of his girlfriend from his hands, nevertheless slams her against the wall and that Bizet theme sounds, to which the heroine usually goes to another world, nothing like that happens in this performance. Friends, girlfriends, classmates drag the collapsed girl, slap her on the cheeks, give her some water - and now she is already sitting on a bench, stunned, slightly uncoordinated, but alive. And to the accompaniment of a Spanish song, some quiet dancing begins - some kind of cozy “slow”, like at a quiet disco.

You can survive, says Sigalova. Sometimes it works.

Anna GORDEEVA