Marathon behind the microphone – Newspaper Kommersant No. 53 (7498) dated 03/29/2023

Ksenia Mikheeva’s project “The Place That Never Was” was presented on the new stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater as part of the Golden Mask competition. In addition to the main one – “The Best Performance of Contemporary Dance” – the production received four nominations: two acting, composer and lighting designer (Emil Avramenko). Tells Tatyana Kuznetsova.

Ksenia Mikheeva, a multiple nominee and even winner of the Golden Mask (for the play The Last Tea Party), received her higher ballet master education within the walls of the Vaganova Academy. However, there are no traces of Russian training in her latest work. The dancer, choreographer, teacher and founder of the company called “Project Ksenia Mikheeva” clearly did not waste time on internships in Europe. Her “Place That Never Was” is one of the most modern performances in terms of basic knowledge of dance technique, work with space and objects, as well as the ability to set and solve specific semantic tasks not with words, but with the body.

From the national mentality, the choreographer has a love for literature in general (her track record includes many performances based on world classics) and for the word in particular. The well-thought-out and calculated musical sequence of “The Place That Never Was” (the play’s composer Oleg Gudachev was awarded a separate nomination) is woven into mutilated words, individual syllables, interjections and other sounds like growls that the characters make when they reach the microphone.

There are five active characters, many microphones. The actors hang from the grates on cords, the long free ends of the cords writhe and swirl on the stage board in many-meter loops. Scattered on the floor, dozens of fake microphones play a semantic role: they are the corpses of mouthpieces, useless surrogates of the power that a person’s voice, amplified by a real microphone, gives a person. Dummies are suitable only for burying under them the lifeless body of a character who, along with the microphone voice, has lost his life.

The metaphors of this play are easy to read. Distorted speech is, of course, a global depreciation of the word: its meaning is replaced by intonation. Meanwhile, she too – interrogative, imperative, ferocious, plaintive – is also not a way of communication. A person who has acquired a microphone (that is, the right to vote) also receives power over his own kind. That is why between disunited, wary and at first sight indifferent townsfolk there is an incessant positional struggle for the possession of this harmless device. That is why the outbursts of aggression are so fierce and the transitions from insinuating uncertainty to the bestial savagery of the fight are so sudden.

In the climactic episode, a single woman walks over corpses in the most literal sense. She adapts the insensible body of the character who has expired – flexible like an octopus, limping warily and looking around fearfully (Ksenia Mikheeva herself, nominated for the best role) – adapts this way and that to get to the high-hanging microphone. Folds the “dead” in half, bends his knees and elbows, standing on his back, as if on a stool; finally, he raises his body almost to its full height, crucifying its limbs between microphone stands – and achieves its goal with innocent efficiency and almost charming cynicism, while men beat each other in the back of the stage.

Each of her competitors received their own solo, staged in the style of “physical theatre”; dance manipulations with dressing and undressing, during which the moral transformation of the characters takes place, are composed witty and performed quite masterfully. Among young guys, loose and smooth, Alexander Chelidze stood out – a charismatic bald man with gray stubble and a toned eloquent body, a worthy rival of ballet premieres in the Best Actor nomination. Gutta-percha facial expressions of an old convict who has seen all sorts of times, but has not lost hope for revenge, and attractive plasticity, making one suspect a revelation in every spasm of a muscular torso, makes Chelidze’s character the center of the performance. And the main contender for victory in the “Place that has not yet been”, but in which we all ended up here and now.