Prologues and sequels

"Workshop'07" opened

This time the organizers call the annual festival “an equation without unknowns”: almost all its participants are already familiar to the capital’s public. The point here is not the laziness of the curators, who did not find new and fresh talents for the most representative festival of contemporary dance in Russia: there were simply no explosive debuts last year. Fest calmed down and began to present a measured diagram of the daily life of dance in the country - without revolutions. Today and over the weekend, everyone can see this picture on the stage of the Assembly Hall, the Modern Theater and the Luna Theater.

As always, the festival brings together two programs - “small” and “large form” (the first shows are at four o’clock in the afternoon, the second in the evening), and, as always, this division is conditional. Thus, the daily program includes not only a five-minute composition by Kaliningrad resident Vitaly Glukhov “The Quiet God” and Tatyana Gordeeva’s monologue Gallina Aquatica (the choreographer, who is also a dancer, explains that the play is not about a wet chicken, but about a water chicken), but also “Radio Dance” , a performance by the St. Petersburg Iguan Theater, with a small number of participants, always talking about global things, exploring the main myths and psychoses of the Russian people. The Kostroma duet “Dialogue Dance” deserves special attention in the afternoon program: Evgeny Kulagin and Ivan Estegneev became the main discovery of last year.

Traditionally for “Tsekh” there is a confrontation between two grand dames of Russian contemporary dance - Olga Pona and Tatyana Baganova. (Their works, naturally, are in the evening program.) The Chelyabinsk Theater of Contemporary Dance will show Pon’s “Attraction”: a performance both about gravity, which all dancers fight, and about the attraction of people to each other. The poster indicates that the work is not completed, and the proposed half hour is only a fragment of the future performance. And the Yekaterinburg “Provincial Dances” are finishing the conversation they started a year earlier - they are presenting the second part of the play “After Involvement,” promising that there will be no external references to the first (no tragic pregnant ladies piercing balloons hidden under their dresses with needles, no uncles, hiding in houses that look like coffins). The rhyme will be internal, and we must discover it.

And only the “third pillar” of domestic modern dance, Alexander Pepelyaev, who in fact invented this festival seven years ago, will not have a premiere. Whether this is due to artistic considerations or whether people did not have time to complete the work, the premiere of Pepelyaev’s next performance, “Flies Tskotukh,” will take place only on December 22. Everything is there - in the Assembly Hall.

Anna GORDEEVA