Let me dance from my heart – Kommersant

Diana Vishneva’s Context Festival opened its season at the DK “Dawn” with the “Message” project, coinciding with the International Dance Day. I tried to decipher the plastic messages of four domestic choreographers Tatyana Kuznetsova.

International Dance Day is celebrated all over the world on the birthday of Jean-Georges Noverre, the choreographer of the 18th century, who left to mankind not ballets, but his “Letters on Dance” – a theoretical work that schoolchildren still study in ballet academies, and modern choreographers supplement with their own reflections on the nature and purpose of dance. The author of the idea and curator of the “Message” Ivan Estegneev invited four young authors, inspired by the sayings of the luminaries, to present their own plastic “Messages”. They were supported by “the sound messages of pioneer composers who came up with multi-directions,” as the curator of the musical part of the project, Vladimir Gorlinsky, described the activities of his wards. Director Philip Gurevich ensured the unity of all those who spoke with the help of the text, actress Elena Shanina and the general mise-en-scene – The Message is broadcast in a closed rectangle, on one side of which are musicians and dancers free from plastic tasks, and on the other three the audience sits on chairs. Spiritual quotes from the messages of luminaries (such as “To dance means to participate in the vibration of the universe by action” or “The spirit of dance has no color”) float on the back of the performers, dressed in black loose pants and tight, differently cut tops.

Our authors participated in the “vibration of the universe” with the awareness of their lofty mission. Tatyana Chizhikova, who lit up on the Golden Mask with her “Fractional Move”, during which she performed an elementary “shotgun” facing the wall, signaling that the folk dance had reached a dead end, here also limited herself to minimal “actions”. For her artists, she composed one pas for numbers from one to nine, that is, nine movements each. Let’s say, on the count of “six”, someone did a somersault from a chair, someone threw a chair, someone threw a leg over its back; at the count of “seven” everyone beat their chairs on the floor. The numbers were counted out in random order by two singers, at the culmination raising their voice to a scream, and by the end they moderated to a barely audible whisper; the loudness of the sound corresponded to the amplitude of the movements. Thus, according to the choreographer, “a dry formula of numbers was able to find its own poetry and become more of a medium for the manifestation of meanings, rather than meaning.” There is no doubt: Chizhikova’s choreography, available to anyone who wants to move, can become a breeding ground for the development of amateur performances in the field of avant-garde dance. And indeed, what is the point of developing if everyone who tumbles is already considered a dancer, and the one who came up with a somersault is a choreographer.

Elena Churilova chose as the epigraph to her “Message” the statement of Kazuo Ono, the great creator of the philosophical butoh dance – the Japanese “dance of the dead”, that he would like to “dance the life of wild grass.” And she illustrated this life with available means. At first, her dancers shook their whole bodies for a long time and clumsily (apparently, the “sprouts” were released from the “seed”), then they “sprouted” with their arms outstretched upwards. They swayed with their whole body under the gusts of the “wind”, crawled on all fours, resisting the vicissitudes of the weather in the form of puffs of stage smoke, walked on half-fingers, stretching out their open palms to the “sun”. Struggling for existence, they wrapped their arms around each other and lay down one by one on the ground – apparently, winter had come. The finale, however, affirmed the continuity of the life cycle: the “grass” suddenly danced again with big batmans and other large synchronized steps, performing the “ritual of knowledge, sensitivity and understanding of life”, which the author honors her composition with.

The most sincere and musical (and therefore the most convincing) “Message” was noted by Ilya Manylov, who took Ohad Naarin’s thesis “We need to resist conservative thinking” to heart. The choreographer, who once danced in the Eccentric Ballet in Yekaterinburg, knows how to make a fun number. He knows how to collide different rhythms in one episode, does not hesitate to use win-win means such as a break, likes to emphasize the strengths of his artists and hears music: a female solo – a bodily analogue of a cartoonish tongue twister that one of the singers broke out – turned out to be almost the only example of an intelligible ” dialogue between music and dance.

The artists involved in the “Message”, familiar from last year’s “Context”, gave their best, showing bodily activity without halftones and frills – that semi-acrobatic training that is commonly considered here as knowledge of “modern dance”. Alas, for a quarter of a century of our openness to the world, neither choreographers nor artists have completed a full-fledged jazz, modern or contemporary dance course in Russia – they were in too much of a hurry to speak out, having mastered the basics at fleeting “master classes”. Now those who attended these “universities” became teachers and writers themselves. It is no wonder that our choreographic “messages” sound like the immortal phrase of Vitaly Mutko: “Let me speak from my heart.”