Snapshot

The ballet part of the Moscow tour of the Mariinsky Theater has ended

This year, the Easter Festival included dances in its program for the first time - in addition to symphony and choral concerts, in addition to Ringing Week and a short visit to the opera (today at the Musical Theater St. Petersburg residents sing “The Love for Three Oranges”), the Mariinsky ballet was shown during the May holidays in Moscow. The theater has not had such large-scale tours in the capital since 1998 - St. Petersburg residents came, but for a day or two, for one or two performances. It's five o'clock in the evening here; representative catalog of the repertoire. Two performances of the “golden classics” - “Swan Lake” and “Don Quixote”, two programs of Balanchine one-acts and an evening by William Forsythe. The Mariinsky Theater shows in what ways it has remained the same and in what ways it has changed.

The prima ballerina remains unchanged. Then - on the rise, now - on the conquered throne, Ulyana Lopatkina continues to be the first ballerina of the country. On these tours, she again appeared in “Swan”, and art critic Faina Balakhovskaya described her Odette best. “You see,” a colleague told me, “Lopatkina is like Neo in The Matrix, when bullets are flying at him, and he slowly turns around between them.” Another level of movement, yes. And the trained corps de ballet seems fussy, because the ballerina sets the pace.

But the leading dancer has changed. Then he, of course, was Igor Zelensky; The now 38-year-old dancer, who last summer became artistic director of the Novosibirsk ballet, did not spoil Balanchine’s ceremonial “Diamonds,” but his performance did not become the main event of the tour. There was a performance by Leonid Sarafanov in Don Quixote. Six years ago, the Bolshoi Theater lost the winner of the Moscow competition - the Mariinsky Theater won it; Since then, the bony boy with a childish smile managed to dance in Europe, gained fame as a virtuoso and consistently almost lost several promising theater dancers - he just couldn’t get any support. In Don Quixote, this glory of an impolite gentleman faded: no, the duets were imperfect, but the hero of the day tried and kept his partner (Olesya Novikova). At the same time, it became clear why at the Mariinsky Theater, where ballerinas always “built” partners, Sarafanov was not only tolerated, but also loved: his personal dances made up for all the shortcomings of the duet. A high jump, a jump in which invisible graphic calculation and demonstrated charming frivolity are combined (this is what Vladimir Vasiliev once had, as can be seen from the films). Prowess in pirouettes, clever cunning in the game - he turned out to be a great Basil and downright Seville, and not a Barcelona barber.

Another event of the tour was the appearance of Alina Somova in Moscow. In the Mariinsky troupe, the girl working in the theater for the fourth season has the status of second dancer and a set of ballerina roles in her biography. In the capital, Somova danced the Queen of the Dryads in Don Quixote - that very insidious part where the second ballerina must jump diagonally after the leading role; it is always a competition of abilities and ambitions. Cheerfully flying over the stage (with her long legs tracing more than a split in the air, the angle was 200 degrees), Somova diverted all the attention to herself - that’s it, the ballet could be renamed in her honor.

But not all of the “new generation” of the Mariinsky Theater was pleasing to the eye: over the past almost ten years, some young talents managed not only to prove themselves, but also began to quietly degrade. A disappointment (for those who saw the dancer’s debut in this role at the Mariinsky Festival several years ago) was Mikhail Lobukhin’s performance in “The Prodigal Son”: a strongly built young man waved his arms like a traffic controller, stepped on his partners like the leader of a street gang, and so on I felt like a star, that Philip Kirkorov should have cried with envy. In this complex ballet of early Balanchine (still a full-fledged plot, already the text is more interesting in graphics than in the acting), courage and humility are needed in equal measure; Lobukhin's last evaporated.

The tour also had organizational problems, for example, tickets were not sold at the box office of the Musical Theater, where the tour took place, but at the online box office, to which the festival website referred, tickets were thrown out in some strange blocks: either four expensive tickets would appear, then two cheap ones , then there’s nothing at all for the evening, and a day later there are a dozen empty seats. There was some nonsense going on with the programs: when there were replacements of artists (quite frequent), no announcements were made. All the spectators who did not know the face of soloist Evgenia Obraztsova (winner of the recent Golden Mask), probably went home with the thought that it was she who was seen in the role of Cupid in Don Quixote; who actually danced this part is still a mystery, and this is not the only case of replacement. But still, the 2007 tour, having become a “snapshot” of the Mariinsky Ballet Company, became one of the most important events of the season approaching the end.

Anna GORDEEVA