Lonely European

Nikita Dmitrievsky's author's evening took place

While the Bolshoi Theater is taking a break from its London triumphs (the first ballet performance will take place on October 10, and it will be “The Corsair” by Yuri Burlaka - Alexei Ratmansky), while the Musical is preparing for the traditional opening with “Swan Lake” by Vladimir Burmeister (September 30), and the Kremlin ballet" is rehearsing "its response to Chamberlain" (on October 19 the premiere of "The Corsair" in Yuri Grigorovich's version will take place there), the ballet season has finally begun. Having rented the Gorky Moscow Art Theater for the evening, Nikita Dmitrievsky showed on its stage a program of ballets of his own composition.

The young choreographer (Dmitrievsky is not yet thirty, but he looks like a boy) cannot be called an extreme avant-garde, revolutionary, rebel. What he does is normal European mainstream. In his youth, Dmitrievsky was lucky to get a year-long internship with Jiri Kylian at the Netherlands Dance Theater, and it was there that, apparently, his ideas about how to compose movements and combinations were formed. In all significant European theaters you can find choreographers who can do such elegant, intelligible, but by no means great things. In all European ones, but not in Russian ones. Apart from Dmitrievsky, the head of the Bolshoi Theater ballet, Alexei Ratmansky, still remains the only civilized choreographer in the country. You take two steps to the side, and it’s as if you’re falling into a time hole: MAKHU and GITIS stubbornly produce people with diplomas as choreographers who produce texts in the spirit of the Soviet thirties and fifties, pretentious and dull at the same time. That is, going to a Dmitrievsky evening is like a visit to some German or Dutch provincial theater: you understand that, in general, there is nothing special, but there is peace and tranquility in your soul. Well, like when you see a sidewalk washed with soap.

Nothing special, but the seven girls dancing “Mirror” (the performance was made several years ago for the chamber ballet “Moscow”, but practically did not appear in the repertoire and has now been significantly reworked) are staged inventively and intelligently, the lighting is carefully set. A small ballet to the music of Corelli, Bach and the Coil group is assembled as a chain of visual effects - then a dancer moving along the border of light and darkness is duplicated by a dancer located beyond this border, almost in darkness (and there is a strange, disturbing feeling of sleep, growing tension, suddenly evaporating when the artists change places - this is not a struggle between light and darkness, this is an acceptance of both), then all the girls find themselves in clearly defined squares of light, stretching out in them, as if on prayer rugs. The backlight “removes” the faces, Dmitrievsky uses only the contours of the bodies to construct his ornament, and the drawings that appear on the stage, black in the golden light, make quite a strong impression.

The good thing about the author's evening is that you can track the evolution of the choreographer, see what is changing in him and in his works. Dmitrievsky performed “Déjà Vu” to the music of Wim Mertens last fall at the “Workshops of New Choreography” at the Bolshoi Theater, and in this performance (as in “The Bourgeois in the Nobility”, which was staged earlier at the Mariinsky; not shown at this evening) it is clear that how the invented plastic becomes softer and at the same time more tragic. The hands throw up a little more hysterically; the spine beats more submissively; in drawing contacts - hopelessness and stubborn, but useless strength. A year and a half ago, in an interview, Dmitrievsky said that he makes money from some TV series (it is clear that one-time writing of texts in projects like the “Workshop of New Choreography” cannot be the basis of existence). Then (and now) he kept his face and tried to look like a winner. But the author's evening, designed to remind the world that such a choreographer is confidently working right here nearby, suddenly emphasized the completely sad intonation of this work. Not a single performance by Dmitrievsky can now be seen either in St. Petersburg or in Moscow, not even the humbly sentimental “Melodies of the White Night,” a duet from which Mariinsky guests Yulia Makhalina and Mikhail Lobukhin danced. Well, yes, why does Russia need expats who understand a lot about themselves? We’d rather look at something of our own, indestructibly Soviet, for the three hundred and fortieth time.

Anna GORDEEVA