All-Russian competition of ballet dancers and choreographers announced its results

In the nomination “Choreographers” the competition was held for the third time. The last one took place five years ago. As before, it was held in three rounds: the first – in absentia, on the second – the participants showed solo and duet numbers, and the third was given to mass scenes.

The selection criteria were more stringent than in previous years, and the third round was the most difficult for the contestants. Within 3 days (every day rehearsing for 4 hours) they had to prepare a mass number with the participation of the corps de ballet of the Mari State Opera and Ballet Theater. E. Sapaeva.

Tightened and at the same time made more specific organizers and conditions of the competition. The participant had to choose one of the proposed themes for the performances: works of the classics of Russian literature (most of the participants staged based on the works of Pushkin, but there were also those who took the ballet Lermontov (“The Demon”) or Pasternak (“Doctor Zhivago”) as the basis, Russian folk tales or images of Russian culture and poetry. Moreover, Russian fairy tales were interpreted by the participants quite widely. Thus, the choreographer from St. Petersburg Anton Dorofeev was awarded the third prize of the competition (200 thousand rubles) for the ballet “Flies-Tsokotuha” conceived based on the popular poetic fairy tale by Korney Chukovsky written exactly 100 years ago in 1923.

However, the libretto (and one of the conditions of the competition was to write a detailed libretto of the ballet that the contestant is going to stage) and the choreography of the ballet “Fly-Tsokotuha” were made quite witty and high-quality, so this decision of the jury does not raise any questions, and now the choreographer from St. Petersburg, Anton Dorofeev receives an invitation to the Voronezh Opera and Ballet Theater to stage this ballet. After all, this year, for the first time in the history of the Competition, the winners of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd prizes received a unique opportunity – to stage their performance on the stages of the opera and ballet theaters of the city. Yoshkar-Ola (first prize winners), Ufa (second prize winners) and Voronezh (third prize winners).

The Bashkir Opera and Ballet Theater was especially lucky in this respect, since the silver of the competition was shared by the two best, in my opinion, choreographers in this competition: Konstantin Matulevsky from Moscow and Vita Mulyukina from Rostov-on-Don. At the draw, they drew 7th and 8th numbers, and therefore showed their work one after the other.

This is not the first time I have seen Vita Mulyukina’s choreography. A year ago, at the Arabesque competition, I saw the performance of Nikita Povalikhin, a dancer from Rostov-on-Don, who had recently graduated from the Boris Eifman Dance Academy. The young man was amazing. His dance, unusually expressive, iridescent with fluid plasticity and, it seems, does not stop for a moment, was Vita Mulyukina’s first sketches and approaches to the Mermaid ballet. At “Arabesque” Nikita Povalikhin was noted by the press jury, and the name of the choreographer who staged the unusual number was remembered. In Yoshkar-Ola, the choreographer herself performed her own choreography, staged based on Pushkin’s play of the same name: it was the monologue of the Mermaid and the duet of the Mermaid and the Prince in the second round and the crowd stage staged for this ballet already in the third. Vita Mulyukina told me about her work, approaches to the image, the creation of an unusual fluid and viscous plasticity, as if the body was made of plasticine, after she reached the final of the competition.

– I tried to pass it through myself. I stood in the sea water for a long time and felt both stones and sand with my feet, listened to the sound of the surf … And I tried to repeat these sensations with my plasticity, with my body. It was important for me to convey this transformation of the main character from the beginning of the ballet to the finale. What happens to her internal state and what changes she brings in herself. That’s why I change the choreography in terms of finger technique. I work with her too, she is tougher when the Mermaid is on land… And when she enters the water, she is barefoot, because she is trying to be part of this water.

– Your choreography is not only set to music, you also use text …

– This text was written by a special playwright – librettist. We discussed it for a very long time, what each word should carry … I read it (and my voice on the recording) in different ways, in different moods, in different states.

In a dramatic sense, Konstantin Matulevsky also showed himself brilliantly at the competition. Having built a very clear dramaturgy in his sketches for the ballet Mozart and Salieri based on Pushkin’s “little tragedy”, the choreographer and his two performers – Ivan Negrobov and Tagir Mustafaev from the Voronezh Opera and Ballet Theater, very well showed the inner state of their heroes – Mozart and Salieri . Matulevsky’s view of these relations is paradoxical and ironic. The choreographer uses a lot of grotesque movements and situations in his vocabulary.

Ivan Negrobov, the premier of the Voronezh Opera and Ballet Theatre, a bright and versatile artist, was especially phenomenally transformed in Salieri. In his monologue, Salieri plugged his ears, unable to listen to Mozart’s divine music anymore, and in the mass scene this hero is shown in the shadow of a noisy crowd of Mozart’s fans, but it is he who is the central character here, it is this decision of the choreographer that builds the main counterpoints of the Mozart-Salieri relationship.

– In addition to the fact that I was inspired by Mozart’s music and Pushkin’s work, there is also a wonderful film by Milos Forman “Amadeus”, in which all the characters are revealed in a completely different way. And such stories and such characters were born in my choreography. Of course, I would like, despite the fact that Pushkin is a tragedy, to make a comedy so that the intensity is greater and stronger. I mean the means by which it is expressed. I would like to make it some kind of grotesque story, and then approach the characters through the grotesque, already more humane, realistic, in order to convey the intensity of these relations and this whole story, says Konstantin Matulevsky.

Lilia Simonova from Moscow became the winner of the next All-Russian competition of choreographers. She won a gold medal, the title of laureate, a cash prize of 300 thousand rubles and an invitation to stage a ballet as a choreographer at the Mari State Opera and Ballet Theatre. E. Sapaeva. The scenes from Eugene Onegin shown by her at the competition, although they are largely influenced by such completely different choreographers as Mats Ek or Boris Eifman, are nevertheless talentedly and unexpectedly staged and directed (the heroes in their duet, like modern teenagers, meet and say goodbye, going on stage on a skateboard) and in terms of choreography.

Nevertheless, both the selection of musical material from Tchaikovsky, and frank quotes from Eifman’s ballet “Eugene Onegin”, when leaflets-letters fly from the grate (Eifman ends the ballet like this, Lilia Simonova has a monologue, only instead of Onegin like Eifman, the hero of this Lensky becomes her scene) nevertheless, we advise you to borrow not so openly, but somehow process it.

“It’s great that they are educated, but at the same time they are looking for their own handwriting, their own vocabulary,” disagrees with me the member of the jury of the All-Russian competition, the chief choreographer and artistic director of the Voronezh Opera and Ballet Theater Alexander Lityagin, who also once worked in the troupe after graduating from the Voronezh School Eifman.

– How do you assess the level of the past competition?

– It’s nice that Russian choreographers and Russian choreography in general have a future. It’s nice to see thinking, musical, educated people who find something new for themselves: new vocabulary in order to reveal thoughts in a new way in those works that we all, of course, know. Therefore, the competition is of high quality and professional. He sets a high choreographic bar. The gap in points among many participants is one or two tenths … That is, many went, as they say, “head to head” and such a high result of the participants cannot but rejoice.

Well, with this conclusion it is quite possible to agree. The main result of the competition turned out to be positive: a whole generation of Russian choreographers appeared who are ready and can be in demand by the ballet theater.