A name is a name

The Boris Eifman Theater is thirty years old

The Boris Eifman Theater celebrated its anniversary last Saturday not in its native St. Petersburg, but in the capital, on the stage of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater. The program was designed to track the transformation of a man of considerable talent (who intertwined the four main characters in The Idiot with an ingenuity that would have made Paul Taylor envious of his classic The Moor's Pavane) and with a certain sense of humor (as evidenced in The Marriage of Figaro). into what choreographer Boris Eifman is now, an exploiter of the same techniques, at the same time loving to talk about Creativity with monstrous seriousness (“I’ve been composing choreography for many years now. It’s a hard way of learning about oneself and the world” - from the speech preceding the concert) , was completely impossible. Not a single piece of the early performances was shown, but the troupe's current repertoire was filled with megaliters.

Fragments of different performances were performed one after another, without pauses or announcements - it turned out to be a kind of artistic hara-kiri. Spectators who do not attend Eifman's performances with the professional doom of a ballet critic may not have previously noticed how similar his productions are. Here, in a series of identical duets (favorite composition: a woman lies on her back, legs spread wide apart, a man falls between them and does push-ups) and lifts indistinguishable from each other (in how many performances did a lady jump onto the lower back of a standing partner, crossing her legs behind his back and fidgeted in his hands?), this poverty of imagination could not be ignored.

But it was impossible not to notice something else - something on which this theater has always lived: the amazing work of the artists. That is, God knows what, the crowd is always marching robotically (be it the people in “The Brothers Karamazov”, the “locomotive” in “Anna Karenina” or the mentally ill in “Don Quixote”), heartless machos are throwing fragile women across the stage (Eifman loves, so that the hero would swing his partner low in the air, like figure skaters in todes, and then lay him on the floor) - but with what fantastic discipline, with what dedication both the corps de ballet and soloists work! Neither the Bolshoi nor the Mariinsky Theater even dreamed of it.

The theater set incredible ticket prices: the cheapest cost 3,000 rubles, the most expensive 9,000. (By the way, a ticket to the first row of the stalls for the premiere at the Paris Opera costs no more than 130 euros; most often you can keep it to 90; the gallery with which everything is visible, it will cost ten.) Non-poor people were lured to a salad of “The Seagull”, “Red Giselle”, “Who’s Who”, “The Brothers Karamazov” and “Anna Karenina” (all performances, except the recent “The Seagull”, have already been in Moscow) with the promise of the participation of Svetlana Zakharova and Ulyana Lopatkina. Both divas actually took part in the concert. In a small fragment from “Red Giselle”, she demonstrated her fantastic flexibility and the Muscovite’s sculpted, nature-inspired rise (next to her thinly brittle Ballerina, the Chekist performed by Yuri Ananyan looked like just a bear, carefully moving an expensive toy in his hands); turned the erotically delirious “Two Voices” into a strict parable, into a gallery of graphic poses of a St. Petersburg woman. Why did the first ballerinas of the two theaters - given their busy lives - bother and learn a controversial text that they obviously will never need again? Why did the stars of the Bolshoi Theater go to London in January and dance at Yuri Grigorovich’s anniversary party together with his Krasnodar theater? The theater was such a failure that the earth shook, all reviewers gave the lowest ratings, The Independent reported that “The action moved from boring bombast to utter monstrosity.” But the magic of the name - even if it was sold long ago, like laughter - continues to work. Eifman is still the main choreographer of St. Petersburg - both for the artists and for many spectators. True, after this gala the number of his fans will clearly decrease.

Anna GORDEEVA