A century and a little more

Today the country is burying Igor Moiseev

Igor Moiseev lived a century and a little longer - his heart stopped on the night of November 2 at the 102nd year of his life. When his centenary was celebrated, he was still in uniform - from the box of the Kremlin Palace he saluted the crowd of six thousand with a glass of champagne. Ballet training (and the founder of the most famous folk dance ensemble in the world began as a true classicist, becoming a soloist of the Bolshoi Theater at the age of eighteen) often gives longevity, but this is still a record for ballet dancers.

Moreover, in his youth, fate was not at all kind to Moses; he got it so bad that it was quite possible for him to break down and begin to deal with his sorrows in the traditional Russian way. The young soloist of the Bolshoi believed in the choreographer’s talents of Kasyan Goleizovsky and spoke in his defense when the future famous choreographer was “available” at the Bolshoi; as a result, he himself was temporarily excommunicated from the stage. Moiseev’s own productions (and he composed his first play at the age of 24, and the list of his works includes “Football Player”, which for the first time combined the theme of sports and dance, “Salammbo” on the plot of Flaubert, where the choreographer became interested in orientalism, “Three Fat Men”, which amazed audience with the triumph of eccentricity and an undisguised love for the circus) did not stay long in the repertoire: the country was building a new imperial aesthetic, and witty experimenters, even in ballet, seemed too unreliable people.

But at the end of 1936, Moiseev found his own niche in the shrinking work space: he founded his own ensemble. The first rehearsal took place in February 1937.

Moiseev collected folk dances - yes, he processed them, of course, but even more he simply invented himself. And several nations owe him the invention of dance folklore. His love for eccentricity, but at the same time for a justified, non-ballet gesture, it all resulted in this ensemble, in this theater - Moiseyev ballet, as it was called around the world.

And since then this ensemble has been dancing. Over the past seventy years, the ensemble has been called the ambassador of the Soviet Union approximately seventy thousand times, and this has always been true. Moiseev created a diplomat who was unconditionally trusted, and after the war he was sent first to the Finns, then to the Czechs, and in general wherever it was necessary to smooth out the impression of the politics of his native country. The choreographer himself was not at all burdened by such a fate, he was even proud of it. It’s not that he didn’t try to go somewhere away from the ensemble: he founded the classical ballet theater, but left it a few years later (now it is led by Natalya Kasatkina and Vladimir Vasilev), in 1958 he made his own version at the Bolshoi. Spartacus" (but, alas, nothing remains of it). But the ensemble and its school remained the main work of his life, and all this life they worked with precision and brilliance. The mechanism has been debugged, and now nothing will change - except that in the title the words “under the leadership of Moses” will be replaced by the word “name.”

Igor Moiseev will be buried today at the Novodevichy cemetery. And on November 13, in the Tchaikovsky Hall, the ensemble will dance in honor of its founder...

Anna GORDEEVA