Four roads

Young authors showed their works on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater

The “Workshop of New Choreography” was held for the third time - the year before last, the country’s main theater for the first time provided the stage of the Great Rehearsal Hall to debutant choreographers. (The event was closed.) The result of that show was the invitation of Yuri Burlaka to the production - at the end of this season the theater will present the reconstructed "Corsair" (Burlaka is one of those who creates the future of ballet, looking into its past, resurrecting ancient styles - at the workshop he showed masterly reconstructions of several variations). Last year’s workshop did not bring such significant results (it was a “home” workshop - only Bolshoi artists presented their work; but everyone who wanted it received a free ticket). Now the doors have opened again for choreographers and closed to the public: only those who work in the theater and journalists are allowed in. This is how the balance of stagnation and innovation is maintained: if fresh people are working on the stage, then the administration should look rotten.

And the people in the project are non-trivial. The idea is to look at how the experience of working abroad changes a person's view of the world. Four small ballets presented four different twists of fate and five choreographers.

Anna Abalikhina and Dina Khusein blaze a trail furthest from the Bolshoi - they practice modern dance. They studied it in Holland, where a coordinate system was set. Having returned, they created a sensation the season before last with the play “Flies” (Moscow Theater of Nations): the duet of a patient trying to step out of the window and a snake-like nurse entered the short list of the “Golden Mask”. The next work, “Instead of My Dream,” was no less impressive, and now the girls were given a chance to shake up the Bolshoi. They were scared.

At the beginning of their performance “I think, therefore I exist,” a soundtrack sounds: the dancers’ remarks (“Who am I? How does the heart work?”, etc.) are blended into a ragged hum. Six people walk in a line from the left wing to the right wing and back; with each passage of the “wave,” someone lags behind, freezing in a “random” pose: either a couple in which the girl hangs limply on her partner’s shoulder, or a lone dancer lowered in a plié. The pictures are meditative and even entertaining; in the finale everyone will freeze in different poses: the one who thinks is unlike the others, etc. The peaceful picture is annoying precisely because it was created for the Bolshoi artists: they (Anna Balukova, Victoria Zagrebaeva, Victoria Litvinova, Vladislav Lantratov, Alexander Smolyaninov, Egor Sharkov) obviously can do more than march in formation. But the authors were unable or unwilling to build a complex movement.

The next writer arrived from Germany, where he has been working since the age of sixteen, but nevertheless he is familiar to the Moscow public. The premier of the Hamburg Ballet, Ivan Urban, danced at the Bolshoi (Neumeier's A Midsummer Night's Dream), and was called in to help when one of the artists fell ill. He appeared as a choreographer for the first time - not only in Moscow, this is his first work. The duet “Moment” to the music of Samuel Barber (danced by Marianna Ryzhkina and Jan Godowsky) is a clear student work, without great innovations and obsequious copying of authorities. A lot of complex lifts and gentle steps - a combination that is always present in Neumeier's ballets, but there is no duplication of vocabulary. The man tries to hold the woman - to protect her with his hands, to carefully lift her off the ground, but she will leave, he will look in bewilderment at the empty hands through which she seems to have melted...

Another debutant is from London. Vyacheslav Samodurov graduated from the Vaganova School, danced at the Mariinsky Theater for almost ten years, then moved to Holland, and from there to Covent Garden. He also staged a duet - with Ekaterina Krysanova and Andrei Merkuryev. A completely different intonation - not similarity-partnership, but struggle. In Krysanova there is a ringing of absolutely crystal form, a Balanchine echo, pure menacing stature. In Merkuriev there is the flexibility of a snake, a petty and stuffy temptation. The two faces of ballet, heaven and earth, are arguing, which ends with both the ballerina and the dancer falling: all options for existence are exhausted by the reserve of physical strength.

The last was Nikita Dmitrievsky's performance - "Deja Vu". Perhaps there is self-irony in the name - several years ago, he, a corps de ballet dancer, was fired from the Bolshoi for attempting to become a choreographer. (Since then, he managed to work in the outlying troupes of Moscow, in St. Petersburg, in Italy - however, he earns money on TV.) The ballet to the music of Wim Mertens is about the instability of life: the movements (one can already say “as always with Dmitrievsky”) melt, hands closed in a circle above the head - a standard pose - float almost like a Möbius ring. But if Dmitrievsky ends up in the upcoming encyclopedia, it will be as the person who was the first to work so carefully and closely with light. Shades, halftones, penumbra, silhouettes emerging and concealed by light, not the frontal light of the ramp, but other possibilities of existence are spelled out in the light and choreographic text. It is unknown whether the emerging choreographers will be offered to stage anything. But the fact that the very possibility of other roads was discussed at the Bolshoi is no small matter.

Anna GORDEEVA