Translated material
A place for the “fourth age”
Jiri Kylian's film and Mats Ek's ballet meet in Stockholm
The Stockholm Dance House kicked off the 2007/08 season with two super events in one evening. Jiri Kylian presented the premiere of the film Car-men, and Mats Ek composed a new ballet “The Place” for Mikhail Baryshnikov and Ana Laguna.The artistic director of the Dutch Dance Theater was not the first to divide the name of the fatal gypsy with a dash, revealing in it a combination of “machine” and “men”. Previously, Matthew Bourne had done the same thing, but his film was a gay drama and the main character was a car mechanic. Kilian has no trace of these motives. There are both men and cars. But the main role is still a woman.
The four heroes run along the deserted hills and drive different wheels in front of them. The film is black and white, the effect of scrolling an old film is simulated - all movements occur a little faster, a little jerkier than in a regular movie. The characters are running, fussing, jumping funny, and we can’t immediately tell which one is which. Well, they finally fall to the ground. They are resting.
The dancer playing the role of Carmen (Sabine Kupferberg) is approaching sixty, and the camera is merciless to her heroine: sagging skin, shadows placed in the folds of the eyelids and seeming to deepen all the wrinkles, a short dress over swollen knees, thickly painted lips, an intimately flirtatious neckline of the dress. discussed in detail and slowly. A whore is created on the screen - an old and cheap whore. But for some, she is Carmen - the one and only. Here for this sad clown (Karel Hruska), who looks at her with an enthusiastic teenage gaze.
A weak and admiring admirer is a brutal admirer; the layout is as ancient as the world, but it seems to me that in Escamillo (David Krugel) Kilian put the story of not only a bullfighter, but also a blackamoor from Fokino’s “Petrushka”. Smug animal strength; the hero is a well-fed winner; here he is in work pants with one strap and a militant beret. He is one of those people who gets everything going in his hands; both cars and women obey him.
Next to this traditional trinity, Micaela (Gioconda Barbuto), the clown, and Pierrot in a child's panama hat and with a medical bag in his hands are still fussing, but she, as in the original story, does not have much importance.
The film, recalling the famous melodies of Bizet, but saturating the soundtrack with extraneous noise, watches these four in the hills. They run with wheels; they are at a scrap metal dump (not an ordinary trash dump, but just some place after a man-made disaster - twisted metal parts scattered across the sand and no human traces) collecting a car; they get into the car.
That is, this thing, a crazy pepelats made from garbage, naturally cannot drive. But in reality it cannot do this, but in dreams and memories it can easily do so.
The whole film, this whole Car-men, is a trip back to memory, to youth. The four climb into the scrap metal structure (Carmen with Escamillo; Jose and Michaela at the steering wheel thingy), and the shot changes. We see some kind of big race. And the cars belong to pre-war times (if not before the First World War), and everything is filmed in the manner of a silent comedy - kicks and trips, competing cars demolishing everything in their path and jumping over a bridge that has just been blown up. This is how it was in the youth of the heroes - or almost so, but now there are only fragments of iron debris in a desert canyon.
But for Jose it doesn’t matter. Yes, he rushes into memories with delight, but since nothing has changed in his soul, he does not even notice the changes in Carmen. She is still the same for him, and in his crazy dreams she tames a luxurious new car gleaming with black varnish, wielding a scarf like a muleta. (“Chic”, “new” - by the standards of the 20s; now these can only be found in museums.)
And even though they are all funny and pitiful - the grown-up Carmen, the proletarian macho Escamillo, the impoverished idealist Jose, and the terribly grimacing Micaela - they are all for real. And jealousy, too, and when Jose “gets to the point”, the wheelless colossus, releasing clouds of black smoke, moves away and crushes Carmen.
But... there she is, alive, not gone anywhere. Dreams and memories never die. He gets into that black car from his dreams (whether there is anyone in the driver’s seat is not visible) and drives off, waving his hand at Jose.
Whether the program rhymed this way by chance or not, whether the two great choreographers of the 20th century decided to sum up the results at the same time or whether it was just a joke of fate, Mats Ek’s performance also turned out to be about the “fourth age.” And this was a duet of artists who were not young either.
Ek hasn't staged ballets for ten years, if not more. Just as he exploded in the last quarter of the 20th century with his versions of The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, Carmen and Chopiniana, he later went into computer technology. We thought he wouldn't come back. In “The Sleeper,” the princess then turned out to be a young drug addict, the fairy Carabosse her lover-drug dealer, and Prince Désiré a virtuous young man who fearlessly shot the poison seller. In Carmen Suite, the bony, mature, domineering, cigar-smoking Carmen drove the perfect boy Jose crazy (Maya Plisetskaya fell in love with this version - the performance was shown in her honor in Moscow). And in “Chopinian” an elderly woman, smiling tenderly, recalled her youth, and memories ran across the stage like a flock of young maidens. Everything would be fine, but at the same time the old lady was being stroked by a young man with his penis.
It's hard to imagine a more physical memory of youth; and Ek didn’t give a damn about all the bigots - his mother, the founder of the Swedish Ballet Birgit Kullberg, was playing the leading role.
But now it’s not about mother. Ek himself has gray hair. And so he staged a one-act duet ballet for Mikhail Baryshnikov and his wife, the famous ballerina Ana Laguna.
There is only a table on the stage, and sometimes it seems that this is because nothing else will fit - the ballet is filled to capacity with memories. Memories of "Sleeping Beauty". Here the gray-haired, disheveled Laguna gallops on her left leg the way Princess Aurora once galloped - turning her right leg to the side, slightly shaking it in an eternal movement of impatient disagreement. Here is the duet at the table, and this is almost the very end of “Sleeping,” where a respectable young man and a reformed drug addict are about to get married. At sunset, remember the dawn of Aurora? May be. And remember without sadness.
Because there is today. Baryshnikov here, of course, is a substitute for Ek himself, his double. (The choice of performer is significant, however, Ek is really no worse a choreographer than Baryshnikov is a dancer, and vice versa; they will be considered a glory.) And here it does not matter that Baryshnikov is wiry, twisted, short in stature, that in his eyes there is the same passion and at the same time youthful distrust of the audience in front of him. premiere, disbelief, almost turning into horror, and Ek is long, thin and looks like a perfect old hippie. The important thing here is that they are equal. Because that’s what we’re talking about.
About the venerable years of two great and equal people. About existence nearby. And yes, they, Laguna and Baryshnikov, suddenly seem similar to each other. Suddenly they begin to move in the same way, as if they had lived together for half a century. And the whole ballet is the intersection of life: so she slightly moved the table to the side - it held it (and stands well here). So they spun in a waltz - and several light circles ended with the most sensual, completely reverberating support, when the dancer holds the ballerina by the waist and under one of the knees, and she dies, melts, hangs in his hands.
When the heroine is not around - she has gone under the carpet (fell asleep? died?), the hero’s movements become sharper, sharper. Standing at the table, Baryshnikov seems to be drawing on it a plan for some kind of battle - he rearranges something invisible in the air, sweeps something off the table - it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work out! And the subsequent solo is like pushing, throwing away stuffy air, almost hysterical, almost breaking down.
Baryshnikov also has a memory of this ballet - about “Young Man and Death,” where the young poet hanged himself and then went to wander with death on the roofs of Paris. Baryshnikov is just as furious, but his hero is not at all so reckless. And no matter how he throws the table, closer to the end he will nestle between its four legs. Under the roof, not on it.
But this is not the end. The heroine will still wake up (come to life?), and the couple will try on the role of a monument - they will cover the table with a carpet, a kind of hill will appear, and the two will be erected on it in a solemn pose. (But ballet people will not be able to stand still and will slightly shuffle their feet, walk a little in place even as a monument.) And then the hero will quietly turn around and leave the stage, the heroine will be left alone. This will be the finale, and then the curtain will close. That is, the ending Ek desired, so that he would not have the chance to see Laguna leave.
The Stockholm Dance House - built into an office complex, with a modest hall for 800 seats, business-like and not pretentious, once again presented a premiere of world significance. The selectors of our festivals, capable of renting the most prestigious halls and covering half of Moscow with advertising, were not noticed among the crowd of spectators from all over the world.