Delicious miniatures – Kommersant
[ad_1]
The Yakobson Ballet Theater performed on the stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater with a program of ten miniatures staged by Leonid Yakobson, named after the final ballet. “Brilliant divertissement”, set to the music of Glinka and first presented in 1973, seemed Tatyana Kuznetsova more modern than the current exercises in the “neoclassic”.
The Yakobson Ballet Theater is the legal successor of his Choreographic Miniatures troupe, which the choreographer was allowed to lead in 1969. For five years, the brilliant workaholic, starving for work, created a dozen one-act ballets and about fifty miniatures, which he combined into the cycles “Classicism-Romanticism”, “Rodin”, “Artistic Sketches”. And he would have created the same number (the state of creative stupor was unknown to him), if not for the late diagnosed cancer that mowed him down in 1975, at 71. The leaders who inherited the troupe preserved Jacobson’s legacy to the extent of their own idea of its value, diluting the original repertoire with box-office “Swan Lakes” and rather poor productions of contemporary authors. From time to time, the renewal of some Jacobson masterpiece – either the “Wedding Procession”, then the “Exercise-XX”, then the cycle “Rodin” – shook the ballet community, recalling the brilliant author, pushed by the Soviet authorities to the sidelines of the main choreographic process. Renewals were put forward on the “Mask” and again shaded in the daily struggle of the troupe for existence.
“Brilliant Divertissement” is a continuation and addition of the program “Out of Time. Masterpieces by Leonid Yakobson, which was shown at the Bolshoi Theater last year (see Kommersant dated August 5, 2022). However, a new surge of interest in the legacy of the founder of the troupe, initiated by its current leader Andrian Fadeev, cannot be explained only by the urgent need for import substitution. A subjective factor has also been added: new revivalists have appeared in the Yakobson Theater – teacher-tutors Vera Solovieva and Nikolai Levitsky. Like the previous ones, they are among the first soloists of the “Choreographic Miniatures”, nurtured by Yakobson himself. Like the previous ones, they rely not on handwritten notes (they simply do not exist), not on film documents, but on their own memory – the meticulous Yakobson, who did not recognize the acting gag, firmly hammered the smallest details of the stage text into the bodies and heads of his artists. However, it is not enough to memorize and show the choreography, it is necessary to achieve from the artists its most accurate reproduction. Looks like the new tutors can do it.
The 12-minute “Brilliant Divertimento”, staged 50 years ago for five pairs of soloists and one premiere, strikes with technical complexity and serves as clear evidence that the classical technique has not advanced a single step in half a century (except that it has created a triple sodebasque). Perhaps that is why this ballet did not go on for 30 years – there was simply no one to dance. Jacobson created another lovingly joking excursion into the era of the Sun King, which in his interpretation looks by no means classicist, but typical rococo: broken, slightly cutesy, with exaggerated courtesy and various liberties. Moreover, Glinka’s Brilliant Divertimento, written by the composer in the 1830s using the themes of Bellini’s La sonnambula, allowed the Soviet choreographer to freely play his postmodernist games (which at that time were held under the department of “stylization”).
However, no matter how you call the result, Jacobson’s unbridled fantasy scorned formal boundaries. His choreography is the incessant transformation of classical pas, their paradoxical combinations, the natural introduction of almost clownish acrobatic tricks – like the gentleman squatting under the lady’s leg when she suddenly spins large tours into an attitude dangerously close to him, or the partner holding the ballerina by the “back” leg when she tries to jump a big jet. This pseudo-classical firework seems to be an absentee competition between Yakobson and the main “neoclassicist” – his peer Georgy Balanchivadze: in musicality, ingenuity, originality. And in this battle, the unrecognized Soviet genius sometimes goes too far, repeating his findings several times, so that they are certainly remembered. This is what happens in the central adagio of the ballerina with five gentlemen who do not allow her to take a step on her own and control all her movements (in the Balanchine Rubies, the partners move only the legs of the first soloist): repeated lifting of the lady on outstretched arms and turning her over in an arabesque in the manner of a slow revoltade seems overly polemical.
Jacobson played the men’s parts, providing all the soloists with the most spectacular mini-variations, sometimes consisting of only one combination, with which they rush from backstage to backstage, picked up by the carefree whirlwind of the festivities. The ladies are allowed to “speak out” just as swiftly and fleetingly, because, unlike Balanchine’s neoclassicism, the hero of “Brilliant Divertissement” is a dancer, a kind of master of ceremonies, the owner of a full-scale variation and many solo episodes. The courteous, smiling Denis Klimuk with soft legs and manners did not make it clear for a second that entrechat-six with bent legs, demi-ronds during pirouettes, countless small batteries, a big pirouette broken by “pancakes” and other stunning delights of his party present any difficulty.
The grandson of Leonid Yakobson – his full namesake – decorated the holiday with a video back with bunches of candles on a black background, without showing grandfather’s ingenuity in this decision. Ladies in shortened tutus with tanches looked like little white “bezeshkas” decorated with tiaras and bows; the gentlemen’s camisoles clearly quoted the wedding attire of the average Prince Desire (artist Anna Yakushchenko), but they did not interfere with dancing. None of the 11 soloists looked like an obvious outsider, they overcame the choreographic tricks (some even with ease), without losing their presence of mind, playing on the lexical jokes of the inventor Jacobson.
The renewals of the “Brilliant divertissement” were not limited: among the ten miniatures of the program, three emerged from oblivion. In the “Medieval Dance with Kisses” to the music of Prokofiev, three lords strove to kiss their lords, dressed with all medieval thoroughness; as soon as the couple were alone – Jacobson’s playful nod to the ceremonial “Dance of the Knights” from Romeo and Juliet. “Cachucha” to the music of Pablo Sarasate was a cross between the “Spanishness” of classical and characteristic; it did not at all resemble the Fanny Elsler number of the same name. On the contrary, “The Swan” by Saint-Saens, performed by Svetlana Svinko, defiantly opposed Fokine’s: it was black, tough, strong-willed. However, Jacobson still did not refuse pointe shoes, pas de bourre and death in the middle of the stage. Vestris stood out from the unforgettable old: Dmitry Sobolev excellently played a self-satisfied actor, without sacrificing technical purity in the least; perhaps for the first time I did not have to regret Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Vestris, to whom Yakobson staged this number for the first Moscow International Competition. Of course, not all the participants of the “Brilliant Divertissement” have reached such transcendental heights, but it is obvious that the main repertoire peaks of the heritage have already been taken by the troupe.
[ad_2]
Source link