Ballets “Sazhen” and “Trigger” at the DanceInversion festival in Bashkiria

Thanks to the efforts of the international contemporary dance festival DanceInversion, the playbill of the Bashkir Opera and Ballet Theater was replenished with two world premieres: young Russian authors presented their own variations on the theme of “The Snow Maiden” – one-act ballets “Sazhen” and “Trigger”. Tells Tatiana Kuznetsova.

DanceInversion, the oldest and most respected of the domestic contemporary dance festivals, has now, for obvious reasons, changed its orientation from international to domestic Russian. 25 years ago, this dance biennale was invented by the then director of the Stanislavsky Music Theater Vladimir Urin and Irina Chernomura. Over the past years, they have introduced almost all the important choreographers of the world to Russia, simultaneously organizing master classes and lectures for particularly inquisitive Russian directors and artists. In the peaceful but covid year of 2021, DanceInversion (then under the wing of the Bolshoi Theater) organized a thorough laboratory on modern dance “The Body in the Lead Role” with the participation of the best lecturers, choreographers and practitioners. It was then that the project of staging several performances on the theme of Ostrovsky’s “The Snow Maiden” was born. Having chosen “the national myth, which encodes all the ethical and moral values ​​of the Russian people,” curator-playwright Margarita Moizhes held a competition among applicants. Each of the winners – five women and one man – received the right to stage a one-act ballet in Krasnoyarsk, Ufa, Kaluga and Petrozavodsk. Music, scenography and costumes were ordered for all works. The strong Bashkir troupe probably got the best: master of the Vaganova Academy Maria Ryapolova and Pavel Ryabov, who graduated from the course of choreographer Nikolai Boyarchikov, who in the last century had a reputation as an intellectual and opponent of the Soviet stagnant officialdom.

Their ballets “Sazhen” and “Trigger” looked different, but the approach to the theme of both authors turned out to be similar: the main role was not the body (in terms of plasticity, the young choreographers created a hopelessly old-fashioned choreography), but, in the old fashioned way, the content. More precisely, although transformed, the plot of Ostrovsky’s fairy tale, developed in different genres, is quite recognizable. Maria Ryapolova, a subtle nature who interprets the word “fathom” as “a measure of measuring the depth of the human soul,” produced a poem laden with metaphors, which curator Moizhes classified as abstract, although the events of the ballet are quite concrete: the heroine wandering between the rectangular columns of the forest of life (set designer Alona Pikalova), accumulates “internal content”, “communicating with the outside world” through “touches”.

The first to touch her cheek is Father Frost on the platform near the backdrop, and, in fact, this is where the communication ends – the Snow Maiden descends onto the stage. With Lel, whom the artist Gennady Ostashov dressed in a white gauze jacket and white tight briefs, communication unfolds into a whole duet: the Snow Maiden in her tight bodice with triangular petals bristling on her hips, looking like a plucked swan, presses her whole body against him, turning her legs in a la seconde and asking for horizontal support. However, after carrying the heroine on her shoulders and twirling her around, her caricatured, smug chosen one soullessly retreats backstage. Mizgir is given much less time and space: he touches the heroine on the same narrow platform near the backdrop, using gestures expressing passion since ancient Soviet times – this is how Khan Girey explained in “The Bakhchisarai Fountain”. The heroine reacts like Maria: she fearfully rejects the advances and tries to commit suicide by throwing herself backwards from the “mountain” platform.

The heroine, tied to the lounge, repeats the suicide attempt three times, each time reappearing on the “mountain” from the behind-the-scenes abyss, but finally she ascends to heaven, and, as the program explains, “a ray of light takes on the face of the Snow Maiden.” This metaphor is embodied on stage in the adagio of the Tree and the Bird (the male corps de ballet trees are dressed in black trousers with branches appliquéd on their torsos, the female birds are equipped with black “wings” in the form of a figaro), in which the supports of the duet Lel and the Snow Maiden were repeated. However, in “nature” everything happened amicably; in the end, the animated representatives of flora and fauna retreated backstage in an embrace. You can, of course, add to the description of the action a story about the leitmovements of the ballet (like trampling the “birds” in the pas de bourre suivi – like in “Swan Lake”, only on half toes), but even without that it is obvious that the opus is “modern” Master Ryapolova could only be received by inexperienced spectators and curators who were in love with their project.

The satirical grotesque “Trigger” by choreographer Pavel Ryabov, staged in the spirit of a farce, looked both more logical and energetic. The live orchestra, led by Alexander Alekseev, very enthusiastically performed the fantasies of Olga Shaidullina with all her “patterns” in the form of quotes from Glinka, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, and the percussionist, vibraphonist and sonorist singers on stage inspiredly accompanied the dance of the characters with their improvisations. In a vibrant performance, designed by Alona Pikalova and Alla Nikolaeva with an eye to the theatrical constructivism of the 1920s, Berendey appeared as the ruler of the city of Constructor. Hidden in a hard cone of a red robe, crowned with a semblance of a boyar’s cap, armed with a megaphone, he vigilantly looked after the happiness of the puppet residents. The trigger turned out to be the Snow Maiden with long dreadlocks, who descended on a longue from the grate like a female analogue of Tarzan. It seems that the brave Adele Filippova composed this part herself, having been given the task to come up with movements expressing an extreme degree of freedom: her wild shamanic gyrations, throwing her legs in different directions, wheels and jumps seemed to be the result of improvisation. Berendey’s betrothed Lel, a singer of totalitarian harmony who spoke mostly with his hands, was not to her heart. But Mizgir, fascinated by the savage, freed himself from the articulated planes that made up his outfit, gained natural plasticity and remained the only black sheep in the city after the trigger-Snegurochka again fled to the grate. A clearly thought-out and clearly stated author’s plan is one of the main advantages of this lucid performance, the disadvantages of which include excessive lexical paucity: neither the genre nor the puppet nature of the characters can justify such a schoolboy set of movements.

Probably, for the Bashkir theater with an academic repertoire, staging these ballets became a useful experience – the artists, in any case, performed them with enthusiasm, and after “Trigger” the audience gave a standing ovation. But for the DanceInversion festival this project turned out to be a defeat. 25 years of tireless educational activity turned out to be in vain: today’s young choreographers are much more provincial, immature and old-fashioned than their unenlightened colleagues of the 1990s – the true heyday of modern Russian dance, as it has only now become clear.