Chronicle of cooperation

Edinburgh Festival has ended

The last in the program of the Edinburgh Festival was the performance of the Israeli Batsheva dance company Deca dance-2008. That is, yesterday there were huge fireworks over the city, the official closing of the festival, but the performances ended a day earlier. And “Batsheva”, one of the best contemporary dance theaters in the world (definitely in the top five), had the honor of completing the program.

But the director’s inspiration, as is known, does not always obey the schedule of pre-signed contracts, even very flattering ones. The artistic director of “Batsheva” Ohad Naharin did not produce a new performance this year; and in Edinburgh the theater presented a program compiled from excerpts from plays composed during the last fifteen years. Fragments of dances from different years were formed unevenly, at the junctions there was sometimes a feeling of a bridge that had not been thrown across time, a gap. Not a single performance, but a panorama concert, a concert - a “creative report”. On the other hand, if there were sharp creative breakdowns in the artist’s life, is he obliged to disguise them for the sake of the harmonious flow of the performance? Nakharin simply presents a chronicle - a chronicle of his life and the life of his theater; has the right.

In this chronicle, one theme does not break, but runs through all times - the theme of cooperation. The choreographer from a country living in a regime of either war turning into negotiations or negotiations turning into war is focused on the theme of mutual understanding and mutual feelings between people. In the rehearsal class, he removes the mirrors so that the dancers look at each other as if in a mirror, reflect each other and exist in a mode of extreme attentiveness. It must be said that in this path he achieved outstanding success: it is hardly possible to imagine a more coordinated ensemble, more sensitive to each other, than in “Batsheva”. The artists respond not only to the gesture of another, but to a tiny hint, to the very beginning of the gesture, and as a result, the overall movement of the ensemble becomes a powerful movement of the sea wave. Sometimes it’s calm - and then the hall freezes, almost stops breathing, afraid to miss even a second phase of movement, and the ensemble shimmers, each figure moves only slightly, the mass sways and splashes with its fingertips. Now it’s like a thunderstorm, and the actors sitting on chairs placed in a semicircle take turns changing their positions extremely sharply: now they jump up from their chairs, now they fall down with such precision, as if the last one was clicked like a domino, and he passed on the movement to the others.

This ideal interaction is the ensemble’s strongest point, and understanding this well, Nakharin collects mainly crowd scenes into the performance. Naturally, the piece from “Anaphase” (the play was brought to Moscow four years ago) has the greatest success, the one when the dancers descend into the hall and drag the spectators onto the stage. Not “planting” - the most ordinary ladies and girls, some who know how to dance and some not so much, and force them to participate in the show. Remembering the Moscow tour of the theater, I can compare the degree of freedom of our spectators and the Edinburgh spectators; The result is interesting. In our country, young girls and middle-aged women were terribly “clamped”, trying to hide behind their partners (although where can you hide), and only ladies who had crossed their seventh decade “came off” desperately. In Edinburgh, everything was more classic: respectable ladies tried not to go to the center of the stage, remembering decency with all their might, the rest danced freely, not thinking that this was a stage and not a dance floor.

In addition to “Anaphase,” Nakharin recalled that he staged Ravel’s “Bolero” (two girls flowed into a slow rhythm with absolute synchronization of movements; when the movements became desynchronized, the harmony in the music began to disappear, the sound became as if the reproducing device had malfunctioned, the melody turned into an unpleasant squeal); “Three” - to the music of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations”, where classical music is easily crossed with Brian Eno, and the dancers play gangster America of the 20s; “Telophase”, which Nakharin is accustomed to, breaks down movements into their component parts. And in each of the works - and in the tragic "Bolero", which tells, in fact, about the end of the world (because it is about the end of music), and in "Three", which next to this "Bolero" looks like a carefree parrot - the troupe worked brilliantly. And in the end, is it really important that there is certainly a premiere at the festival? Nakharin presented his main work - his troupe (even though it was not created by him, but it was only under him that it reached such a class). And this work will certainly remain in the history of dance.

Anna GORDEEVA, Edinburgh - Moscow