Be yourself

Bolshoi artists on a small stage

“Doors Wide Open,” a new performance by Natalia Shirokova, became a natural continuation of her debut at the “Workshop of New Choreography” at the Bolshoi Theater. (In fact, Shirokova has quite a biography - she, together with Tatyana Baganova, created “Provincial Dances”, then went to Moscow and founded her own troupe here; one of her most notable works in recent years was “Hedonics and Erotica”.) Last November At the “Workshop”, Bolshoi artist Anna Koblova danced Shirokova’s miniature “I am a woman, I am a flower” and, apparently, convinced her colleagues that working in modern dance is interesting. Now several young “classics”, not yet noticed by the theater management and therefore not getting out of the corps de ballet, are participating in a new project. Together with the artists of Natalia Shirokova's dance theater, they show six small stories connected to each other rhythmically and intonationally on the stage of the Moon Theater.

In “Doors Wide Open,” the “classics” let themselves go, allowing their backs to suddenly hunch incredibly, their hands to splash around randomly and nervously, and their legs to start an almost disco dance. Classics oblige you to solemnly hold your face and back every day, but here, on the marginal platform of the Theater of the Moon, people are allowed to be themselves; to be weak, to be cheerful. There is a place for reflection and sarcasm - in miniature "Popular Mechanics" sketches of office life (white top, black bottom, queue for the cooler, clarification of the relationship between two guys in the collision of two hands with plastic cups, so that the plastic cracks and wrinkles) lose the specificity of the place and talk about how pointless any struggle for status is. (For ballet, such a view of things is a monstrous heresy.)

At the center of the performance are two monologues by Koblova: “The Seamstress” and this one (“I am a woman, I am a flower”) that was shown at the Bolshoi. In the center not just in composition (the second and fourth numbers in a row), but in significance, in the impression it makes. In “The Seamstress,” where the dancer either desperately jumps, throwing all four limbs back, or clasps her hands on her own throat, or searches, persistently and furiously, for something in the air, and at the back another artist scribbles on a sewing machine, angrily unfolding the fabric , and you understand that here, on stage, the soul is running, ready to hang itself, while the body is working without raising its head. And - in contrast to the menacing hysteria of "The Seamstress" - the elegiac country notes of the second miniature, where roses loom on the screen, the heroine is swinging on a swing near a village house, and a young man in brutal boots, riding a bicycle, is rolling off into the distance. This miniature is about the arrival of autumn, about parting, and although there is also a lot of bitterness in it (the elegy on the screen, on the stage, the dancer presses her whole body into a stupid pink dress lying on the floor, reminding her of summer), this bitterness is not fatal.

The Bolshoi Theater uses Anna Koblova only to the tenth, perhaps, part of her talents - on the theater website in the list of her roles as “Countess Cherry” in “Cipollino”, three swans and a nepmanche in “The Golden Age”. The problem is that it was clearly created for radical choreography, which also requires classical training - and if the Bolshoi had a Forsythe program, there would be a performance for it. But there is no Forsythe at the Bolshoi, just as there is no whole layer of twentieth-century choreography at all. Therefore, now Koblova can only be seen at the Theater of the Moon.

Anna GORDEEVA