Cartoon Tchaikovsky: the world premiere of the ballet “The Snow Queen” took place in Moscow

Andersen’s appeal to The Snow Queen was not accidental. They say that Andersen’s father’s last words were: “Here comes the Ice Maiden, and she has come to me.” The fairy tale “The Ice Maiden” was written by a storyteller in 1861, but “The Snow Queen” was created 17 years earlier, in 1844. According to biographer Carol Rosen, the prototype of the Snow Queen with her cold heart was Andersen’s unrequited love for the opera singer Jenny Lind.

Oddly enough, for unknown reasons, the fairy tale “The Snow Queen” was practically not in demand in the ballet repertoire, while other fairy tales and even novels of the great storyteller are willingly staged on the ballet stage.

The situation changed about ten years ago – Andersen’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen” suddenly became trendy and became in great demand. Over the past 10 years, it has been addressed four times, so this is Sevagin’s production for the fifth time.

The fashion for “The Snow Queen” was, naturally, set in Finland. In 2012, for the Finnish National Ballet, Rudolf Nureyev’s favorite dancer, Kenneth Greve, then the head of the Finnish ballet troupe, created the ballet “The Snow Queen” to the music of the Finnish composer Tuomas Kantelinen, which was an unprecedented success. Five years after this, already at the Yekaterinburg Opera and Ballet Theater, the then artistic director of the ballet troupe of this theater, Vyacheslav Samodurov, turned to the fairy tale, creating a performance based on music specially written for the ballet by Artem Vasiliev. Soon, a performance based on this fairy tale was staged at the Moscow Gzhel Dance Theater by choreographer Georgy Kovtun to music specially written for the performance by composer Radik Salimov. Then a more classical version of this ballet with the same choreographer and composer migrated to Kazakhstan: the production of “The Snow Queen” was staged at the Astana Ballet Theater at the very end of last year.

Let us note that all the directors, without exception, invited contemporary composers to create the performance. Only Maxim Sevagin followed the path of least resistance and decided to use a seemingly win-win option for his ballet: he created his ballet to music that was not only popular all over the world for more than a hundred years, not just brilliant, but equal to which humanity has not yet created – music of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies.

Andersen divided his fairy tale into seven stories, which Sevagin follows exactly, removing from his narrative only a few characters – the Laplander and the Finnish witch, who meet the girl and the Deer on the way to the North Pole, to the island of Spitsbergen, where, as the reindeer tells Gerda , and there are the “permanent palaces” of the Snow Queen.

When conceiving his performance, Maxim Sevagin was clearly inspired by animation. The production designer Ekaterina Mochenova, costume designer Yuldus Bakhtiozina, lighting designer Konstantin Binkin (light, according to the directors’ idea, “is a guide to the magical world”) and video artist Sergei Rylko, who were invited by him to the production, created a cartoon universe for the performance: even the main characters of the fairy tale Kai and Gerda here have unnatural and quite cartoonish yellow hair, and the overwhelming majority of the fairy tale’s heroes appear before us in such a cartoonish form that even the actors playing the main roles are impossible to identify.

The know-how of the performance is the masks they wear. This is a kind of return of ballet to its past. Let us remember that before the Noverre reforms in the second half of the 18th century, ballet (and not only ballet) dancers performed in performances exclusively wearing masks. The half masks of the Snow Queen and her retinue, as well as the half masks of the flowers that Gerda encounters in the enchanted garden of the Sorceress, turned out to be spectacular and equipped with spikes (in the Snow Queen’s retinue, these spikes resemble icicles). But it was precisely this cartoonish and stylish beauty that ruined the performance.

In fact, the music from Tchaikovsky’s three symphonies, which Maxim Sevagin chose for his performance, is used very often in choreography. Boris Eifman, for example, to the same music in his ballets (Tchaikovsky, Anna Karenina and many others) shows the depth of feelings of his characters, penetrates into the depths of personality, into its psychology, into the secrets of human existence. In Sevagin, clowns with yellow hair run around to the divine, trembling and tear-inducing melodies of Tchaikovsky. And in general, in many scenes, tragic-sounding music written in the blood of the heart illustrates some kind of farce.

Almost all the scenes here are staged like cartoons. So, in the palace, equipping the carriage for the journey, the courtiers with foam bellies, butts and thighs and intricate wigs on their heads supply it with all sorts of food supplies: chicken legs, roach hanging on a string, ice cream, lollipops, cake and other food. The palace here was first invented in the form of a cage in which the courtiers and the prince and princess live, like birds. And then, when the wheels roll up to it, this cage turns into a carriage. Instead of horses, this carriage is driven by comic dwarfs, who will then be boiled alive by the robbers who attacked the carriage in the same cage that has turned into a vat… Well, it was invented quite creatively, although it is dubious in terms of humor, but all this categorically does not fit with Tchaikovsky’s music chosen by the choreographer.

Having learned some shocking techniques from director Bogomolov (with whom Sevagin staged the ballet “Romeo and Juliet”), the 26-year-old choreographer apparently just wants to “tease the geese.” As a result, the music in ballet exists on its own, as do the choreography and costumes and scenery. All these layers in the performance are in no way consistent with each other. And the result of this combination is vulgarity.

Sevagin uses Tchaikovsky’s music not just to illustrate the scenes he needs. Sometimes piquant situations arise in choreography. For example, the beautiful and well-choreographed duet of Gerda and the noble reindeer is quite reminiscent of a love affair.

Let us note that the performer of the Deer part in the first cast, Denis Dmitriev, compared to how Arthur Mkrtchyan dances the same choreography in the second cast, still does not highlight the movements when the girl and the animal are rolling around the stage, and the Deer, saving her from the cold, lays down on the poor girl several times, covering her with her body. Dancing Sevagin’s choreography in his own way, Dmitriev tries to avoid that unnecessary and rather risky affectation that arises in the relationship between the girl and the animal in the choreography of the performer in the second cast. Ballet, of course, is a conventional art. But still, we advise the choreographer to refrain from such a convention that we see in this scene and prefer the version shown to the public in the first cast. Moreover, the choreographically the duet is not bad at all.

But this handsome artist cannot avoid the anecdotal. At the whim of the artists of the play, Dmitrieva’s Deer is endowed with very small, almost imperceptible horns, which look just like details of a hairstyle, but rather long ears, which makes the artist somewhat resemble a donkey.

In addition to Denis Dmitriev, other artists also perform excellently in the play: the theater’s premier Georgi Smilevski (senior) is incomparable in the role of the broken Atamansha, and his nephew Georgi Smilevski Jr. plays the roles of Crow and Crow. and Alexandra Dorofeev; the role of Rose in the garden of the Sorceress, who helps Gerda, besotted with other flowers and having forgotten everything, remember about Kai, was very suitable for Anfisa Oshchepkova, and of course, Kai and Gerda were magnificent – the newly minted premier of the theater Innokenty Yuldashev and prima Ksenia Ryzhkova, of course, a little ridiculous in yellow cartoon wigs, but spectacular in their latest duet, inventively set by Maxim Sevagin to the 2nd movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony.

It’s funny that the previous sixth scene, entitled “Back to the Future,” was staged again using the 3rd movement of the Sixth Symphony, to which a parade usually takes place at ballet gala concerts: the performers performing puzzling tricks and bowing to it . Sevagin organizes a similar parade-alley in the play. The choreographer also uses this music to meet all the heroes of the fairy tale.

The choreographer ends his ballet with the seventh scene, not included in Andersen’s work: Kai and Gerda find themselves in the future, at the premiere of the play “The Snow Queen”. The decoration with light bulbs marks the theater building with columns, on which there is a giant poster with the image of the Snow Queen in her half-mask with spikes and the inscription: “Staging by M. Sevagin.” As the curtain closes, the poster queen suddenly comes to life, and her projection, using a cinematic effect, looking into the hall, passes a building with columns from left to right.