Carpet opening – Newspaper Kommersant No. 64 (7509) dated 04/13/2023

On the Small Stage of the Mayakovsky Theater, the play “DӨR” by the Kazan creative association “Alif” and the theater stage “MOÑ” ended the dance competition “Golden Mask”, in the poor program of which Tatyana Kuznetsova finally found my favourite.

Each time, getting to the “Golden Mask”, Kazan citizens present projects that differ sharply in their depth and non-fussiness from the ostentatious sophistication or speculative deliberateness of other “contemporaries”. In 2018, in the epic “The Call of the Beginning”, dedicated to the fate of the Tatar writing, the authors presented a bodily analogue of the Arabic script to the chanting of the archaic alphabet, endowing each letter with its own series of movements; then the “Golden Mask” was presented to the “scribe”, the charismatic dancer Nurbek Batullu. Last year, the mesmerizing performance “hAVA”, in which the themes set by the audience were translated by the poetess into lines running down the back, and the dancer into their plastic counterpart, strangely fell into the category of “experiments” and remained unappreciated, it seems, precisely because of its uniqueness. Both projects were choreographed by Marcel Nureyev.

I bet he won’t get the “Mask” even now: his works are too “piecework”, and the method is too individualized so that the result can be assessed as a “choreography”, that is, a kind of finished product that can be purchased on the dance market in order to then reproduce elsewhere with other performers. Everyone is indispensable in DӨRe. Moreover, the performance itself is also irreproducible, each time being born anew, since each of its creators changes his part – after all, today he is no longer the same as he was yesterday. All of them pretend to the “Mask”: “DӨR”, like other products of modern dance, is hung with nominations, like a Christmas tree – with toys. In addition to the main one – “Best Performance” – both choreographers (Marseille and Maria Nureyev) were nominated for the “Mask”, they were also nominated as performers. All three improvisers-musicians (Melas Spiridon, Erik Markovsky and Sugder Ludup), who made an equal contribution to the creation of the sound environment of the performance, got into the “Best Composers” category. But if in other cases the total promotion of all the creators of the stage product causes protest (often due to the wretchedness of the choreographic text, sometimes due to the helplessness of the performers or the patterns of “original” electronic music), then the “DORa” monolith is really indivisible. This is not a spectacle, but a real “black hole”: a closed space, saturated with sound, visual and bodily energies and sucking in everyone who is in the field of its influence.

“Dor” in translation from Tuvan – “a place of honor in the yurt.” But this is not an ethnic study, this is a search for universal principles. The unearthly rumble of Sugder Ludup’s throat singing, his shamanic tambourine, plucked doshpuluur and long-necked igil with sheep’s wool placed under the strings, immediately – even in the darkness of the pre-spectacle – plunge into the archaic depths. The Greek Melas Spiridon, a connoisseur of Byzantine singing, colors the primitiveness with an ancient Mediterranean chant, interspersed with the dreary whistles of the Turkish flute “ney”. A native of Karelia, percussionist Erik Markovsky with his bendir, daf and Indian foot bells gungro covers all of Asia – from southeastern dancing rhythms to endlessly monotonous Sufi whirling.

To create a bodily analogue of such a powerful sound stream seems to be an impossible task. However, unlike their “contemporary” colleagues who compose pseudo-philosophical “Matters”, “Reveal” and other uplifting spirits, Marcel and Maria Nureyev, who have been working together for 20 years, set themselves specific, one might say, formal tasks. With a smart decision (and these intellectual choreographers managed to perfectly educate their bodies, adapting them to tasks of any complexity), any formula inevitably soars to the heights of generalization, giving rise to unexpected meanings and emotions. In DӨRe, the patterns of a home carpet spread on the floor became a formal source. Dancers-choreographers reproduce its ornament with increasing fullness and amplitude. First, horizontally, sitting on the carpet and flexibly weaving intricate patterns with his hands; then, moving along the perimeter 3×4, they master the vertical – with the whole body. At the same time, not only arms-legs-back, but also each joint knits, braids and unravels its own knot.

The density of patterns, their logic, their secret meanings – everything has a bodily counterpart. Movements speed up, their complexity increases, vocabulary expands, tempos and emotions rise. Primitive stomping turns into intricate zapateado, shamanistic whirling into almost ballet chené, shapeless wild jumps into expressionistically broken jumps. Each stage of dance evolution is separated from the next by complete darkness; the climax is a semi-parterre adagio, in which two bodies are intertwined into an inseparable, tense and dramatic knot, objecting to the harmony of yin and yang with each of its suffering articulations.

Due to the natural naturalness of the dance text, “DӨR” stands next to the masterpiece of Sidi Larbi Sherkaoui – “Afternoon of a Faun”. And its creators, dancers Marcel and Maria Nureyev, are in no way inferior to another famous singer-songwriter – Akram Khan, a British with Pakistani roots, who included a thousand-year-old kathak in a modern dance context. The difference is that both Khan and the semi-Moroccan Sherkaoui have been able to objectify their individuality by successfully staging performances to order for other dancers and even classical troupes. London gave Akram Khan the English National Ballet, carte blanche and an insane amount of rehearsals – and the famous “Giselle” turned out. Sidi Larbi Cherkaui, also the best performer of his first works, then hosted in the main theaters of Brussels, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Geneva, Monte Carlo, Antwerp. It is hard to imagine that any Russian theater with its planned economy will give its artists to the perfectionist Marcel Nureyev, who has been preparing his next “experiment” for years, bringing the performers to the required degree of dedication. This means that authentic modern dance in Russia can only survive as an optional extra. And regionally.