Flowers of no return – Newspaper Kommersant No. 56 (7501) dated 04/03/2023

“Golden Mask” presented on the stage of the Moscow Drama Center the duet play “Adam and Eve” by the St. Petersburg project “Vasilevadanceco” to the music of Henry Purcell and Edison Denisov. The performance, put forward in the competition section “Modern Dance”, received, in addition to the main one, four more nominations. Blooming ancestral feelings did not convince Tatyana Kuznetsova.

The experts of the “Mask” showed not only unheard of generosity, but also, let’s say delicately, a peculiar taste, giving five nominations to such cutesy ladies’ needlework as “Adam and Eve”. Well, all right: two “Masks” are provided for any nominated novelty, no matter how insignificant its choreography is – for some reason it is believed that if a performance claims to be the “best”, then the author / author who composed the body movement in it is also potential “best choreographers “. However, in “Adam and Eve” there are also performers whose professional and acting abilities do not go beyond home dancing (even if this “house” is the dance group of the MusicAeterna ensemble of Teodor Currentzis). The very fact that recent graduates of the Herzen Pedagogical Institute Yuliana Anfimova and Maxim Klochnev are on the same list with high-class professionals (whether they are academic dancers or contemporary artists) discredits both the nomination itself and the selectors. However, experts in ballet/dance from among the experts did not publicly speak out in favor of “Adam and Eve”. Even the announcement on the website of The Golden Mask (“The body language in her performance is “grown” according to Akhmatov’s recipe: from the rubbish of everyday gestures and grains of inexpressibly beautiful plastic “accidents” through which the flickering of eternity can be seen”) belongs to the pen of a music critic.

Beautifully said – in the spirit of the performance itself. But there are no “ordinary gesticulations”, as well as “accidents”, on the stage – the choreographer Olga Vasilyeva does not put a gesture or a step in simplicity. In “Adam and Eve” everything appeals to high culture: hands reach out to each other, as on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, bodies pose brokenly, as on the canvases of the Mannerist era. And not a single painter can dream of decorating: the nominee artist Pavel Brat planted man-made paradises on the stage, strung tens of thousands of artificial flowers on 900 meters of wire. Flower garlands entangle the grates, hanging from them with tropical vines and forming real thickets. The platform of the stage is covered with a thick multicolored carpet of flowers – to the envy of Peter Pabst with his carnations from the performance of the same name by Pina Bausch.

Beautiful Adam – huge children’s eyes, sensual, like from Botticelli’s self-portrait, lips, long legs in black trousers, long arms, open with an “alcoholic” T-shirt – tumbling in the flowers and shaking the vines to the divine sounds of Henry Purcell, lies down to rest at the hillock. A woman’s hand sticks out from behind him, followed by Eve herself. In a black long-sleeved (but transparent) dress, she fits on the young man, clearly demonstrating her origin from his rib. Having floundered a little and divided into two individuals, Adam and Eve enter into a high relationship: long glances, quivering plexuses of the hands, careful crossing of the shins, stroking the air near the faces. No apples and seductive snakes. The fall probably occurs at the moment of tearing off their clothes: remaining “naked” (in shorts and a flesh-colored bra), the ancestors merge in a lying kiss. Very chaste: the heads are in contact, the bodies are maximally divorced. Eve’s activity shocks Adam; the righteous man manages to avoid intimacy despite the fact that the woman now and then climbs onto his loins, tightly wrapping her arms and legs around his torso. In the end, the delicate young man offers her flowers instead of himself – hangs a garland around his neck and moves into the shade. Shocked, Eva comes to the forefront and stretches out her arms to the audience, holding flowers like a swaddled baby.

In the finale, the ancestors, who have not tasted sin, join hands and, leaning on each other, like old spouses, on half-bent legs, wearily wander from the Garden of Eden into the darkness behind the scenes, leaving open the question of the origin of mankind. But the point, of course, is not that the performance lacks the details of intercourse. It’s just that the love of Adam and Eve, composed by Olga Vasilyeva, is false from the first to the last stirring of the actors’ raw bodies, representing that “false, fake significance, fake beauty, fake intelligence, fake attractiveness”, which Nabokov called in one word – vulgarity.