Low “Matter” – Newspaper Kommersant No. 177 (7378) of 09/26/2022

At Winzavod, five performances and the play “Materia” opened the 10th Context Contemporary Choreography Festival, created and directed by Diana Vishneva. Due to the CBO, by the anniversary season the festival lost its international program and concentrated on domestic authors. About the first results of the total dance import substitution tells Tatyana Kuznetsova.

The tenth Context offered a solid program for our time. Within a month, in addition to side events in the form of a final exhibition, educational lectures, children’s workshops and film screenings, he will present four original projects involving a specially created troupe of 16 artists and a dozen and a half contemporary Russian choreographers. Almost all of them have been opened by Context: since the first year of its existence, this international festival has been holding a competition for young domestic authors, having to be interrupted only during the pandemic. So the landscape of Russian young choreography was familiar to Diana Vishneva and the curators of this direction, as a zealous summer resident was familiar with his own six acres.

Like any gardener, “Context” has both favorite pets and those to which he is less reverent. The latter were given 10-12 minutes each for self-expression, ordering performances on free themes. The festival opened with their daytime joint performance under the heading “performances”, although there was nothing specifically “performative” in these plastic exercises – except perhaps an increased attention to accessories, especially developed among poetically inclined ladies. It is clear that now is not the time to talk about same-sex relationships, so female duets consisted mainly of waving – sort of restless vibrations of the body and hands, synchronous or alternate. Objects helped to express the spiritual connection – skirts with trains, which the Zhukov sisters clung to in miniature “du(o)ality”, or multi-meter rolls of paper with which the choreographers Lilia Burdinskaya and Victoria Maksakova entangled themselves, prudently keeping a distance in needlework under the telling name ” Nothing is wasted.”

The male break quartet donned voluminous plush animal masks on their heads, calling their string of subpar sports stunts “an exploration of men’s states of mind and body.” The miniature “Attention” by Anna Shchekleina, who works in a rare genre of modern lubok, turned out to be the most adequate and valuable. Having put on T-shirts with self-playing inscriptions (such as “why are you / am I here?” Or “a little / more love”) on the artists of her Omsk company Noga, she analyzed the poor behavioral set of today’s “crowd man” – from herd feeling and readiness for aggression to private reflections and struggle for understanding. The choreographer also included the public in her social research: the audience, not without pleasure, obeyed the commands of the charming protagonist – they raised their arms and legs, violating the “private space” of their neighbors without hesitation.

Unlike the wild-growing “performances”, the one and a half hour “Matter” festival carefully cultivated: uniform scenery, costumes, lighting, sound design. Curator-director Pavel Glukhov was called upon to combine the 10-12-minute performances of eight choreographers into a coherent performance, hoping that the given theme – “matter” – would keep the authors within the framework of philosophizing, to which the pupils of “Context” are especially prone to annotations to their works. The tone for Materia was set by Konstantin Keihel from St. Petersburg, who literally depersonalized the artists, dressed from head to toe in dull gray leotards, their faces, like those of movie robbers, were covered with “stockings” of the same gray color. These primary elements either lined up in a structure (in a column, at the back of each other), then spread out across the stage in visible chaos, actively bending their bodies and spreading their arms in different directions with decent smoothness. At the end of the performance, Petersburger Ernest Nurgali showed us the spiritualization of “matter”, uniting the same gray corps de ballet with a collectivist round dance and a common kneeling prayer.

Between these poles, “matter” acquired gender differences, although not fundamental ones. So, the power dance of four warlike men and no less aggressive woman (whom the director Vasilyeva considers “an integral part of a man, fuel for his fortitude”) was not much different from the composition of Olga Timoshenko – no less brutal dance of five women, easily dragging each other in support , sizzling rivals with hating glances and juicy smacking on the floor. After such trauma-prone “materiality”, the almost classical tours, attitudes and jeté, composed by the ex-soloist of the Bolshoi Theater Andrei Merkuriev, looked like a flight of serene spirit. Another ballet author, Stasika dancer Konstantin Semenov, who is familiar with modern trends firsthand, but from the repertoire of the music theater, applied his knowledge in a composition deployed according to the rules of ballet master science – with alternating groups and solos, mise-en-scenes and choreography, lyrics and physics, but without obvious author’s intonation. But the super-demanded choreographer Vladimir Varnava was recognizable in every jump of his demonstratively lightweight duet.

Real modern dance with its close attention to identifying the possibilities, needs and ways of communication of specific bodies and their owners was found only in a fragment of Olga Labovkina. This brave native of Belarus, who went through international practice – artistic and staging, turned out to be the only one who dared to lower “Matter” from the heights of philosophy to the sinful earth, ignoring the thesis accepted by modern authors from the approaching past: “There is no sex in the Soviet Union.” In the episode staged by her, the artists seemed to have been replaced – their bodies worked with such conscious courage and unearthly naturalness. However, it is difficult to hope for a consolidation of this experience – most of the pupils of the “Context” are now masters themselves. They not only actively put in line with “modernity”, but also teach young people spiritually uplifting bodily passes. Now, moreover, without any competition.