Portrait meeting – Newspaper Kommersant No. 36 (7481) dated 03/02/2023

On the New Stage of the Bolshoi Theater, the Yekaterinburg Ural Opera Ballet presented the LAD project, a ballet homage to composer Leonid Desyatnikov, invented by pianist Alexei Goribol. The chances of “LAD” for the “Golden Mask” estimates Tatyana Kuznetsova.

The LAD project, conceived even before the pandemic as a tribute to the 65th birthday of Leonid Desyatnikov and named after his initials, is musically outstanding. Combining music from various works by Desyatnikov in one program, Alexei Goribol, his musicians and the Yekaterinburg choir performed it with penetrating subtlety, while the portrait of the composer turned out to be amazingly integral (see Kommersant dated November 8, 2021). Probably, it would be wrong to tear the project apart, highlighting only one of the four ballets of the program. But still, only a post-COVID diet can explain the generosity of experts. In addition to the main nomination – “Best Ballet Performance” – they nominated three artists (Maria Tregubova – set design and costumes, Melanie Frost – costumes, Konstantin Binkin – lighting) and three choreographers – Maxim Sevagin, Andrei Kaidanovsky and Vyacheslav Samodurov. Only Maxim Petrov, the author of the first of four ballets, was cheated: the helplessness of his pretentious Three Quiet Pieces, which defiantly ignored Desyatnikov’s music, was immediately obvious. It seems that this young St. Petersburg author has already overcome his creative peak: the title of his 2021 masked performance “Russian Dead Ends-II” turned out to be prophetic.

However, the works of other nominees at the competition seemed weaker than during the post-COVID euphoria. Andrei Kaidanovsky, who works at the crossroads of ballet and dance theater, set his “Feast of the Departed” to the music for the play “The Living Corpse” and “Sketches for “Sunset””: their Jewish and tang roots can make even the legless dance. However, the choreographer, famous for his ability to show the human soul in all its defenselessness in the most strange and clumsy bodily twists, here demonstrated discouraging rationality, regularly dancing tempos and rhythms and leaving overboard the emphasized emotionality of the music, even ironic. Perhaps in this way Kaidanovsky tried to move away from dance clichés or eradicate any manifestation of sentimentality. But, having invented his own puppet theater with archetypal characters, the choreographer did not fulfill even the formal tasks. For the stage life of the Widow, Daughter, Detectives, Drunk, whom Melanie Frost dressed up in funny, almost clown costumes, the director did not find any plot justifications, no internal connections, no individual language. With physical culture efficiency at a fast pace, all the characters flail their feet (batmans, big rondos, splits, coups in lifts), make faces and exaggerate gestures, as befits puppets. But a “holiday”, especially a “leaving”, nostalgically sad one, does not come out of this mechanical fuss.

Maxim Sevagin’s “Irreproachable Mistake”, set to the piano “Elegy” and the play “Like an Old Organ Grinder …”, at first encouraged with its ingenuous adherence to music. Two couples (in the first, the man is wearing only a jacket and shorts, but the woman is in an evening dress, in the second, the man is in trousers, but with a bare torso, and the lady is in a bathing suit, but with gloves), just like clothes, they share musical instruments. The second couple responds to the dissonances of the violin with appropriate – sharp and broken – movements, the first couple reflects the piano beauty – with canonical classical pas and strokes. When the instruments sound in harmony, the two duets turn into a pas de quatre, complicated by the change of partners. However, the choreographer did not have enough for the variations: the most original in them was the identical departure of the soloists from the stage. More precisely, a roll: lying down on the floor, the performers rolled backstage like logs, which looked rather comical in the context of the schoolboy slickness of the production.

Vyacheslav Samodurov in the program “LAD” composed the most successful and most complex ballet – “The Gift” to the music of the cantata of the same name for tenor, male choir and instrumental ensemble, written by Desyatnikov to the verses of Gabriel Derzhavin. The choreographer managed to abstract both from the content of the lush verses and from literally following the music, having shown considerable courage and resourcefulness in the intricacies of humor and pathos, classical dance and sign language, video and live mass action. On this “Mask”, the choreographer Samodurov knows no equal and competes only with himself: “Dancemania”, staged by him for the Bolshoi Theater, received 11 nominations. Perhaps this is generally his best work, in any case, in terms of performance – it is not for nothing that the experts nominated all six leaders of this performance. And although it is unlikely that the judges will be able to single out the winners in this fast-paced dance kaleidoscope, its creator Samodurov can certainly be called the choreographer of the season.