Approximate and floral – Newspaper Kommersant No. 26 (7471) of 02/11/2023

Artistic director of the ballet of the Muzteatr im. Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Maxim Sevagin showed his next production – “Bloom” to the music of Antonin Dvorak, presenting this one-act ballet in the best program of the theater – in company with “Kaash” by Akram Khan and “Autodance” by Sharon Eyal. According to Tatyana Kuznetsova, the audience benefited from such a neighborhood, but the premiere lost.

“Bloom” (apparently, Maxim Sevagin did not turn his tongue to call his opus simply “Blossoming”) first saw the light in July 2019: the 15-minute composition was included in a variegated ballet gala given on the occasion of the end of the season. The 22-year-old graduate of the Vaganova Academy looked alive, though not original. The déjà vu effect was created by borrowings from Balanchine and Robbins, which are cult for Petersburgers, so obvious that they could be considered deliberate quotations. However, in a dynamic finale, in a form typical of a class-concert code, the young choreographer allowed the artists to show everything they were capable of. For men – diagonals and circles of stunt jumps, for women – complicated rotations, for couples – risky high supports. This major note inspired optimism: it seemed that the young choreographer, the soloist of the music theater himself, understood the capabilities of his colleagues and would soon work out his own language with their help.

Everything has changed over the past year: the erudite and far-sighted ballet artistic director of the Museotheater Laurent Hilaire was forced to leave the troupe after the start of a special operation, and the general director of the theater Andrei Borisov appointed 25-year-old Sevagin to take his place. The novice choreographer had to worry not only about the formation of the repertoire in the conditions of international isolation, but also about maintaining the form of the troupe itself. It can already be said that the young artistic director failed to cope with the second task: the autumn Grand pas from Paquita and the recent premiere of The Nutcracker by Yuri Possokhov demonstrated the deplorable state of the corps de ballet and very vulnerable soloists.

Maxim Sevagin is going to replenish the repertoire with modern domestic authors. In the October Program No. 1, he showed sketches of two of them – Pavel Glukhov and Ksenia Ternovskaya, after which it became clear that nothing uplifting or even entertaining should be expected in the coming seasons: of all young authors, Sevagin himself looked the most promising. It looks like the artistic director’s fresh productions are meant to become the core of the updated repertoire. In this context, bringing the episodic “Bloom” to a full-fledged 40-minute one-act ballet was quite reasonable. Another thing is that the chamber structure to the music of Antonin Dvorak’s “Serenade for Strings in E Major” did not need to be expanded – there were neither formal nor artistic grounds for this. And although the full-length Bloom retained the same impetuous finale and all the same references to the luminaries of American neoclassicism, the young author’s own artistic foundations turned out to be so infantilely fragile that the whole building collapsed into the boundless waters of naive, vulgar provincial prettiness.

In the first, illustrative, part of “Blossoming”, the flowers are materialized in the form of the nine best soloists of the music theater in lilac trousers with high belts and bare torsos. Rolling across the floor from one graceful pose to another, they reach for the rays falling from the grate, languidly straightening their shoulders, “singing” with their elbows, softly playing with their hands – in a word, they copy the plasticity of Fokine’s “Phantom of the Rose” without its technical virtuosities. However, so that the men do not completely pamper themselves, the choreographer now and then makes them lift each other in group lifts, and also allows each of them to jump out a double sodebasque. The next – female – part, if desired, can be classified as an instrumental (or abstract) dance. It is based on those techniques that make it possible to depict choreographic exuberance with minimal expenditure of imagination: the best (and very different) ballerinas of the troupe in identical pale pink chitons perform the same combination in a kind of chromatic scale – one after another in different angles and directions.

Converging in a common dance, the artists are already murmuring in pairs. One adagio, not having time to take shape, is replaced by another, picking up its combinations; asymmetric groups and lone soloists emerge from different parts of the wings and disappear again, now swiftly, now thoughtfully. Someone is carried on their shoulders, someone is carried away, grabbing across the body. The ladies raise their legs, luring the gentlemen, but then coquettishly run away, and the self-sufficient men again begin to “bloom” with floral hand patterns… enveloping the stage in the most poetic way. In this fog, not only ballerinas and premieres with their individual characteristics and skills are drowning, but the steps themselves are leveled – they seem easy and optional. The soothing haze is interrupted by several pseudo-finals; one of them – in the form of a broken semicircular chain of artists frozen in different poses – is even convincing. However, it is false, like all this “ballet ballet” and similar one-day ephemera, for two hundred years condescendingly encouraged for complete senselessness.