Ballet as a provocation

Moscow is waiting for an international dance festival

Czechs and Americans, Portuguese and Belgians will bring their dance performances to Moscow in November. The Dance inversion festival will begin in the capital on November 2, and at yesterday’s press conference the festival’s management presented its program.

The beginning will be exotic and intimate: a troupe from Burkina Faso (three natives of Ougadougou, who met ten years ago in France in the troupe of Mathilde Monnier and then founded their own company Cie Salia ni Seydou) will show three monologues at the Meyerhold Center in which the discoveries of European contemporary dance will be grafted onto the trunk of African dance. Then it will be the turn of the troupe that was just in Moscow: Les Ballets C. de la B. (Contemporary Ballet of Belgium, but here the word “ballet” is more like a provocation, the troupe is distinctly modernist) will present the play “Import-Export”. Dance lovers have just seen their VSPRS performance at the Territory festival, where Monteverdi’s “Vespers of Mary” was dissected, broken and shouted in hysterics; Now Purcell and Couperin will be processed.

The Belgians will begin the “big” festival program, which will be dedicated to the stage of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater (its directorate is the main organizer of the event). After them, the Czech national ballet will tour Bolshaya Dmitrovka - and it is clear that these days the audience will take the theater by storm: in one of the three one-act acts, the St. Petersburg ballerina Diana Vishneva will appear in the title role (her duet with Petr Zuska, Les bras de mer, was shown at one of the festivals in the Mariinsky Theater). Then the National Ballet of Portugal will tell in dance a pathetic love story from the 14th century “Pedro and Ines”: in the story of the heir to the throne, and then King Pedro and his beloved Ines de Castro, there was a fiery passion, four illegitimate children, the hearts of living criminals torn out in the square ( this is how the monarch took revenge for the murder of his beloved) and the coronation of the deceased (she was pulled out of the coffin for the ceremony). What of all this rich plot Olga Rory, who staged the play, uses is still unknown, but the story is very intriguing. And finally, the festival will end on the stage of the Maly Theater branch with a tour of the American company Hubbard street dance Chicago. Their program will include Nacho Duato (one of the most vocal choreographers of our time staged the one-act Gnawa especially for this theater), the fiery Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, the local dancer Alejandro Cerruso, who is trying his hand at composing, and the artistic director of the troupe Jim Vincent (his one-act “Palladio” "Inspired by the work of an Italian architect of the 16th century). That is, the Americans bring performances for every taste, like the entire festival, which this year demonstrates the breadth of views on what modern dance is.

Anna GORDEEVA