In the Bolshoi they inflated the head of God and carried out import substitution

If earlier the project was formed mainly from the works of choreographers working in the West, now there has unwittingly been “import substitution”. Although one foreigner still participates in productions. This is Patrick de Bana, ex-premier of the troupe of Maurice Bejart, who, however, had staged a lot in Russia before that. Nevertheless, the first two performances were given to “domestic producers” – Olga Labovkina and Anna Shchekleina, well known in Moscow for the Diana Vishneva Context festival. From the performances of Olga Labovkina, then her “Air” was remembered, and Anna Shchekleina struck with her work “Freedom for a Statue!” performed by the Provincial Dances troupe. Both demonstrated in them the originality and courage of their choreographic thinking.

Unfortunately, these qualities were not enough for the performances shown at the Bolshoi Theater. The choreography, despite the brightness and unexpectedness of the director’s decision for both of them, was somewhat monotonous, and their works turned out to be somewhat similar. The artists of the Bolshoi, as is customary in modern dance, “gave” a “wave” with their bodies, bending and wriggling, producing viscous-plastic movements. And the action ended both in the first and in the second case with round dances in the style of Henri Matisse’s painting “Dance”.

Labovkin’s first ballet is based on the sci-fi and philosophical novel by British futurologist Olaf Stapledon, The Star Maker. However, the plot here plays an applied and decorative role. On the stage is a spherical room resembling a snail’s house. Behind the glazed window, the lights of the metropolis, skyscrapers. All this is highlighted on the back (video artist Dmitry Martynov), but the focus of the lens begins to move away, rising up. Soon the metropolis will turn into luminous dots, and a certain Observer-narrator (Ildar Gainutdinov), sitting in a room in a bean bag, painted like a globe of continents and oceans, without leaving the room with the help of an “expanding consciousness” goes on a metaphysical journey through the universe, where it happens his “meeting with the Primal Source of all things”. At this moment, the spherical room turns over and suddenly turns out to be an inflated giant golden head, apparently designed to personify the World Mind. The golden radiance (hence the name of the ballet), emanating from the head, according to the libretto, blinds a person who “is unable to free himself from the limitations of human consciousness.” Olga Labovkina is not only the choreographer of this work, she also came up with such an impressive set design.

In addition to the inflatable head, the Higher Mind is also personified in the ballet by the dancer of the Bolshoi Theater Artur Mkrtchyan, and the scene when he appears before the Observer clearly quotes Rembrandt’s painting The Return of the Prodigal Son. This is followed by a beautiful male duet of Mkrtchyan and Gainutdinov – a conversation between a man and God. The music of Ilya Dyagel also helps to reveal the idea of ​​the choreographer in the ballet, however, it is very similar to the musical sequence of Vasily Peshkov in the second ballet of the evening “Nerve”. In this ballet by Anna Shchekleina, we have before us a kind of puppet theater: ropes descending from the grate and attached to the heads of the artists, which seem to be pulled by an invisible puppeteer, symbolize nerve endings and neurons.

It is understandable and natural that for the ballerinas of the Bolshoi Theater (the prima ballerina of the troupe Alena Kovaleva and Victoria Brilyova), who participated in the production, the choreographer used the finger technique, and this came in handy. But no one before her had thought that in order to draw attention to human sensitivity and show naked nerves, you need to tear off the skin from a person. She created an anatomical theater: the dancers work in tight-fitting overalls, where all the muscles of the flesh, the bones of the skeleton, the blood vessels are drawn in detail, as they are drawn in the illustrations in the anatomical atlas. And even the face in this jumpsuit, like that of a spider-man, turns out to be covered with a balaclava hood, on which all the anatomical details of its structure are meticulously recreated (artist Galya Solodovnikova).

Despite the participation of famous sculptor Dashi Namdakov and costume designer Igor Chapurin in the production, the third ballet was the most modest in design in the program. In the center of the scene is a sculptural statue of the head (and to be precise, the skull) of a bull. The sculptor likened his art object to the “sacred horns” of the Knossos Palace in Crete, which, due to the intricacy of its architecture with many rooms, was rethought by the ancient Achaeans as a labyrinth.

The plot of the ballet is largely based on the play “The Kings” by Julio Cortazar, in which the classic of literature of the 20th century offered a very paradoxical interpretation of the famous ancient Greek myth. Ariadne falls in love with him not at all with Theseus, as myth prescribes for her, but with the Minotaur, her half-brother. The Minotaur is a Cretan monster with a human body and a bull’s head, who lived in a labyrinth and was killed by the ancient Greek hero Theseus, whom the choreographer takes out of brackets together with the Cretan king Minos, although they are present in Cortazar’s play. The relationship between the Minotaur and his mother, Pasiphae, is brought to the fore here (this motif is absent in Cortazar’s play), as well as the struggle of the Minotaur with himself caused by these relationships.

Since de Bana considers the ancient Greek myth in the Labyrinth, albeit through the prism of Cortazar, he builds his performance in the form of an ancient Greek tragedy with a choir, a protagonist, a deuteragonist and a tritagonist. The protagonist is the Minotaur himself, and the second (deuteragonist) and third (tritagonist) actors in this tragedy will be his half-sister (by mother) Ariadne (Maria Vinogradova) and Pasiphae’s mother herself (Anna Balukova). From such a mythological scheme, de Bana made a banal love triangle: a man rushes between two women, and the choreographer also hints at incest: love relationships in the ballet are shown not only with his sister, but also with his mother.

The story begins from the end, that is, from the same scene with which the performance ends – the death of the Minotaur, looping the work and letting time go in reverse order from the future to the past. The past is the birth of the Minotaur, which came from the unnatural love of the daughter of the sun god Helios Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos, for the bull sent by the god of the seas Poseidon (in some sources, Zeus), who was then tamed by Hercules and killed by Theseus. According to legend, she seduced a bull by lying down in a wooden cow made for her by the famous Athenian engineer Daedalus. The choreographer shows this delicate episode in passing, placing the dancer in an art object – a sculptural statue of a bull’s head.

The choreography, as in the two previous compositions, is based on slow movements, but unlike them in Patrick de Bana’s performance, the speaking plasticity shows the inner world of the Minotaur full of contradictions.

As was the case in previous times, the MuzArts company, which has been showing its contemporary dance programs at the Bolshoi for many years, has occupied mainly artists from the Bolshoi Theater. But there is also one contemporary dancer, Ildar Gainutdinov. In fact, the first ballet of the Shining program was staged with him in mind. In it, Ildar Gainutdinov really turned out to be indispensable and gave odds to the dancers of the Bolshoi Theater. Although they fit well into the futuristic space of modern ballet (in addition to Artur Mkrtchyan, let’s single out the wonderful duet of Alexei Putintsev and Elizaveta Kokoreva). Nevertheless, in the third ballet of the evening, “The Minotaur”, where it was required not so much to dance as artistically expressive to play the main character, lost the palm to Denis Savin, who showed one of his best acting work in this performance.

His Minotaur has a lot of Roland Petit’s Quasimomode, which helps create the right impression. His hero embodies and radiates the tragedy of his existence and absolute loneliness. The degree of generalization of the problem that Cortazar has, the choreographer somewhat mundane, but caught the main thing: Cortazar’s labyrinth symbolizes the subconscious. Dissecting the subconscious and choreographer. It is especially personified by four characters specially introduced by Patrick de Bana (Vasily Danilchuk, Karim Abdulin, Alexei and Anton Gaynutdinov), reminiscent of a Greek choir in an ancient tragedy. He, as in antiquity, helps the author in revealing the meaning of the tragedy and the emotional experiences of his heroes.

In his performance, de Bana uses the screenplay method, when the episodes alternate, ending with the cutting of the light (light designer Ivan Vinogradov), and the music of Max Richter. The choreographer knows how to cut short an episode in time and radically change the mise-en-scene, so that the next time the lights are turned on, all the characters find themselves in a different place. And this “film effect” keeps the viewer in suspense until the very end of the performance.