The life of an artist

Diana Vishneva spoke about the inability to speak

The first ballet premiere in the 225th anniversary season of the Mariinsky Theater turned out to be, if not an anniversary, then in a sense summing up the results. The performance is called “Silenzio. Diana Vishneva”, that is, this is not even a benefit performance of a prima ballerina, where she is called upon to show off all her goods with her beautiful face, but a fundamental personal statement. She needed to inform her contemporaries about something terribly important to her - and a special production was undertaken to satisfy this need.

The following team gathered to implement it: director Andrei Moguchy, who, together with theater expert Konstantin Uchitel, is listed as the author of the script, “director-choreographer” Alexey Kononov, production designer Okunev, there is also video artist Malyshev, lighting artist Filshtinsky, draftsman Shishkin, sound designer Zhuravlev. These are all long-time employees; together, under the leadership of Moguchy, they produced a lot of things, and now, using the staging tools they were accustomed to, they had to give a marketable appearance to the confession of the famous ballerina.

The spectacle turned out to be clear, internally consistent and expressive. Vyacheslav Okunev cluttered the entire height of the rear stage with light parallelepipeds; they form a screen for all kinds of video projections; the space along the backstage is filled with the same boxes. Boxes periodically fall with a noise: what was built collapses, what seemed solid falls apart. Vishneva wanders in the midst of chaos - at first it is the chaos of a nursery: projections of bears and dolls, she is in a dress with an infantile collar and red tights. Out with the dress, the tights are part of the scarlet jumpsuit from Forsythe's Steptext. And they dance it - Mikhail Lobukhin, Maxim Khrebtov, Igor Kolb became Vishneva's partners.

In the booklet, the authors of the play talk in almost the same words about timelessness, the inability to speak, misunderstanding, the value of pause, silence, silence. Forsythe's Steptext, set to a jagged, halting recording of Bach's Second Partita and Chaconne, is quite in keeping with the theme.

Vishneva puts a “shopkinka” right on top of her overalls - now she is Giselle from the second, posthumous act. She has four partners - the same and Andrian Fadeev. It turned out: the ballerina’s stage lovers change, today you dance with one, tomorrow with another, and you have to love everyone, that’s how life goes... And worldly glory, by the way, too - the shadows from “La Bayadère” hint at the futility of the earthly, which from a hole in the wall, Vishneva restlessly and detachedly moves among them, standing on the turning ring. Indifferent oblivion beyond the grave awaits us...

Fragments of classical texts are interspersed with the walking of some men with lanterns, a children's class - ballet schoolgirls make the barre a huge projection of Diana's face: the eyes are sometimes closed, sometimes open, the mouth also opens, from which letters fly out, spelling out the word "silence", while the ballerina herself doing something Forsyte-esque with his hands.

Pompous chandeliers and crimson frilled curtains (from Vainonen’s “The Nutcracker”) are lowered, two giant doll faces are shown on the projection, and Vishneva in a pink tunic and Fadeev in a black uniform are dancing Balanchine’s Pas de deux to the music of Tchaikovsky. Here is Diana with the required dazzling smile, but after all the close-up vivisectoral adventures with her face, which Mr. Shishkin cut and shaded in every possible way with the help of multimedia technologies, this expression seems almost a mocking demonstration: this, they say, is what kind of victorious optimism one has to portray at a government concert , although my soul is dark, lonely, scary.

Numerous children will dance an almost mocking paraphrase of the dance of little swans (a play specially written “after Tchaikovsky” by Yuri Krasavin), then it will be the turn of the adult swans - in ancient tutus (from the reconstruction of “La Bayadère” of 1900) accompanied by computer inhuman sounds, they take an infinitely long time (six circles !) will run through the famous “stocking”... This, for my taste, is the best place for the performance. Such a plastic, almost unbearable, materialization of a heavy bad dream, when an unstoppably pumped-up darkness fills the heart with cloudy melancholy, mortal languor, has only been seen in the films of Kira Muratova.

Then they started whistling in the hall.

Akhmatova confirmed the guess about the dream: in an senile, farewell voice, she read the Fifth of the “Leningrad Elegies”, at the same time the poems were projected onto the screen-wall: “...And, choking with shame and anger, We run there, but (as happens in a dream) There everything is different: people, things, walls, And no one knows us - we are strangers! We ended up in the wrong place... That we wouldn’t have recognized those who died, And those from whom God sent us separation got along just fine without us...” The final episode, called “The Voice” (finally appearing), -- "Swan" by Fokin. Vishneva came out in something half-rehearsal, without any feathers on her head, and her Swan was sharp, twitchy, so ugly that it could not be considered intentional. She wanted to escape all the time - somewhere, no one knows where, what matters is that it’s from here.

Then, on the swing on the proscenium, on which the heroine had time to swing, a girl appeared, the Swan approached her, and together they retired into the depths of the standing corps de ballet. That was the end of the matter.

Let's summarize.

Postmodernism benefited the textbook texts - Petipa, Balanchine, and Forsythe looked fresh in the new context, and the little swans, which long ago turned into self-parody, are probably only possible now in such a deliberately parodic form. By the way, the freshness was greatly enhanced by the orchestra, which was conducted elegantly and with excellent taste by Pavel Bubelnikov that evening.

The desperate courage of Diana Vishneva inspires respect. Her gloria mundi is by no means transit: a full house, baskets and bouquets in industrial quantities. The bewilderment (to put it mildly) of the audience during the performance was clearly felt, judging by the readiness to joyfully welcome favorite tricks like fouetté and grand jeté from Balanchine: it was like the ballet had finally begun, otherwise everyone was showing some kind of nonsense. Nevertheless, for now, the love of loyal fans for the ballerina is large enough for her to allow herself to do as she sees fit.

Everything seems to be fine and even wonderful for her. Career at its zenith. Glory. People's Artist of Russia is both a principal at the American Ballet Theater and a welcome guest on the best stages of the world. So what? It turns out that this does not interfere with being in a deeply dramatic worldview. And all successes do not, it turns out, automatically make you happy - they don’t do so much that you want to shout about it. And an artist can scream only in one way - through the means of his art. Actually, this is real, correct, benign artistic activity.

Dmitry TSILIKIN, St. Petersburg