Boris Eifman Ballet Theater is 45 years old – a gala concert in the State Kremlin Palace

“Ballet is a synthesis of music, movement, acting, action, technology, design, costumes and many other components. This art is very scarce today, since many young choreographers do not master the art of building a high composition of a ballet performance and simply stage a dance, ”the legendary Boris Eifman said about his life’s work 5 years ago.

The unsurpassed master of ballet performances, who glorified Russian dancers all over the world, brought his best works to the capital, where the Petersburgers presented a grandiose gala concert.

The audience saw a lot of Russian classics, but not the usual Russian ballet classics, but classics of Russian literature: Eugene Onegin, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, The Seagull, The Master and Margarita. All these works are subject to transposition into ballet language. And if the genius of the master takes up the matter, then even more so.

Before the gala concert, the soloists of the theater shared their thoughts with the press.

“Each corps de ballet dancer, soloist appears before the audience in today’s concert in a very large number of different images, this determines the high requirements for all members of the troupe. All the time in the work on the character you find more and more nuances, play with facial expressions, look. Yes, and Boris Yakovlevich is always on the move – changes are made on the go, new mise en scenes arise, even during today’s rehearsals new ideas surfaced, ”Lubov Andreeva revealed to the media the“ secrets ”of working on the production.

The gala concert at the State Kremlin Palace is a celebration for everyone, because fragments from all of Eifman’s key ballets are presented here. When forming the concert program, the key definition will probably be multi-genre. What the audience saw was the best of the best, including fragments from the performances that started the theater, survived by many performers and which most of the audience did not see. An example of this is an excerpt from The Master and Margarita.

Oleg Gabyshev considers Treplev to be his favorite image in The Seagull. Although at the same moment he corrects himself, saying that “everything is beloved and everything is complex, everything has been worked out and thought over so many times that it is very difficult to give preference to one image.” His devotion to the theater is striking – the artist has been performing with the troupe for the 20th season.

How does the dancer of the Eifman troupe differ from the dancers of other theaters? Acting content, without belittling a clear classical vision of ballet. More natural, coming more from emotions than from processing, the manner of performance. At the same time, the style of the dance allows you to get away from false theatricality, so that the viewer can see what the hero is going through, why he is overcome by these emotions.

Maria Abashova, the ballerina whom Eifman staged Anna Karenina, believes that this ballet in 2005 was “ahead of its time.” Many troupes stage ballets based on this work: the Mariinsky, the Bolshoi, abroad also dance Karenina, but in terms of the concentration of the retold text of emotions, no one showed the inner world better, everyone showed the story. Maria noted that usually people leave the performance in tears, which breaks the viewer to the bone.

“We rehearse quite a lot, the main feature of the theater is not technical performance, which is certainly important, but the fact that Boris Yakovlevich constantly teaches to give emotion. And when you give it all the time, it is so developed in the artists that at any moment the artists can turn into any character they like, ”Maria Abashova said about the main thing at the press approach.

Arriving in Moscow, the troupe continued to rehearse all day, and even in the last minutes, until the hall opened its doors to the fans, everything was practiced, right up to the final bow.

In an interview before the concert, Boris Yakovlevich said that this day was very important and exciting for him, because the only time the ballet performed on the stage of the State Kremlin Palace was in 1980. All the past years, the choreographer had been waiting for this invitation, and finally, together with the general director and artistic director of the State Kremlin Palace, Pyotr Mikhailovich Shaboltai, this plan was realized.

Eifman noted that “the Moscow audience gave him a start in life, the team had its first real successes in Moscow. The concert program is dedicated to the audience who know and love the St. Petersburg ballet, and a special gift for the public will be two fragments from old ballets specially restored for the Moscow concert. This is a gift to those who knew us back in those early years.”

The theater troupe is young, and this year there are also many graduates of their own academy, the Vaganova Academy, the Bolshoi Theater School.

The intensity of passions, the energy of dance, the professionalism and talent of ballet dancers – this is what the audience usually feels during the performances of the Eifman Theatre, today it was fully transferred to the huge hall of the GKD.

Eifman’s ballet is a theater of open emotions, a theater that brings to the viewer that special emotional energy that people need so much today. From banned ballets to his own theatre, this is the path choreographer Boris Eifman has gone through, with forty performances to his credit. The maestro was touched by the fact that there was a full house in the 6,000-strong Kremlin Palace.

“45 years is a lot or a little. I am 77 years old, I spend every day in the ballet hall, composing new ballets for 6-8 hours. 45 years of a creative, very complex creative life, which is aimed at creating a new repertoire” – with these words Maestro Eifman ended his communication with the press.

Despite neither the age of the choreographer, nor the world fame, the theater does not stop and strives to create and create something new. For example, today Boris Yakovlevich is staging the ballet Crime and Punishment. It would seem that it’s not ballet material at all, but now, having started work, he believes that “it’s very ballet, and everything will work out.”

The real sensation of the evening was the return to the capital stage of the legendary “Two-Parts”, composed by Eifman in 1977 for the troupe’s debut program. Along with the restored duet from the cult performance of 1987 “The Master and Margarita” to the music of A. Petrov, many of today’s viewers have never seen this landmark production live. And that is why the filled hall of the State Kremlin Palace for several minutes stood up and applauded the masters of ballet performances by Boris Eifman.

Anna Duhon.

Photo by the theater press service