Quadruple discord – Newspaper Kommersant No. 16 (7461) of 01/30/2023

The Nizhny Novgorod Opera and Ballet Theater presented the Moscow premiere of its new performance Terezin. Quartet”, coinciding with the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Tells Tatyana Kuznetsova.

The idea to stage four ballets to the music of Czech composers who died in the Nazi camps was sparked by Aleksey Trifonov, artistic director of the Nizhny Novgorod Opera Theatre. At the same time, four minutes became magical: four string quartets, four ballets by four choreographers, four or eight performers in each ballet. General scenography, general musicians – the string quartet of the La Voce Strumentale orchestra. The name of the project was given by Theresienstadt (Teresin), the most famous concentration camp on the territory of the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia”: it was there that three of the four composers of the program were kept and composed music. From which, however, it does not follow that the fascist dungeons became the through plot of the evening. The dead wrote string quartets in different decades, and the current choreographers staged their plot and plotless opuses without regard to the circumstances of the death of the composers. And only the video – gray stone slabs, the heap of which can be mistaken for bodies in shrouds dumped into a pit (video artist Igor Domashkevich) – sent the imagination back to the tragedy of the Holocaust. Projected onto light nylon curtains, the movement of which either opened or squeezed the space (artist Etel Ioshpa), the video gave the stage events an ominous ambiguity, which the choreography was largely deprived of.

Thus, the debutant Alessandro Caggedgi, an Italian born in England, graduated from the Moscow Academy of Choreography and dancing in Kazan, explored the problem of divorce with the touching naivete of a teenager, choosing String Quartet No. 3 (1938) by Pavel Haas – anxious, nervous, filled with poignant Jewish intonations. The choreographer believed that he was staging a miniature about psychological manipulation. After quite classic (with throwaway jets and an attempt at double sodebasques) showdown between the two men and their brief but passionate adagios with his wife-lover, a lawyer appeared on the stage. Wearing a round hat and long-brimmed lapseduck, he shook a stack of papers and a fountain pen and began to demand the signing of a divorce agreement, and the pecking drama turned into a farce. The Husband broke first, then the Lover gave in, but the indomitable woman, teasing the men with a dance with a fountain pen, for some reason refused to sign. Then the whole trio attacked her almost with their fists, and only cutting down the light saved the audience and the lady who jumped onto the table from assault.

Experienced Tatyana Baganova, taking the String Quartet, op. 2 (1921) by Hans Krasa, composed a plotless but metaphorical pas de quatre, possibly about energy vampirism. The performers, dressed in translucent flesh-colored overalls with black seams on their stomachs and spine, were removing wide transparent vests from each other with their teeth – first men from women, then vice versa. However, the ladies did not limit themselves to this: in the finale, grabbing a thread in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe male navel with their teeth, they pulled out all the “life force” from the partners, leaving them prostrate on the scene board. The choreographic quartet consisted mainly of duets with rare inclusions of solos and differed from other works by Tatyana Baganova in some signs of academicism: eversion of the legs, large poses in the adagio, strokes and lifts, which can also be found in ballets – probably, the choreographer failed to achieve from the “classics » abandoning habitual skills. However, this mixed language turned out to be very harmonious and by no means meager.

The same cannot be said about the Petersburger Maxim Petrov, who staged the most emotional, lively and reverent of the quartets – the Partita for Strings (1944), created by the 25-year-old Gideon Klein in Terezin. However, for a choreographer, Klein, Shostakovich, Desyatnikov, from ballet to ballet, he repeats his favorite combinations of ferme, batteries, entrechat and pas de chat, without being distracted by either the tempo-rhythm, or the melody, or the general meaning of the musical work. Having at his disposal eight artists, this time he was especially active: people jumped and circled along and across the music, from different angles and at all ends of the stage, so that it dazzled their eyes. In the finale, however, the choreographer achieved unity of action: the dancers, lining up in a line, stretched out their arms into the hall and fell together on their backs.

Another Petersburger, Alexander Sergeev, chose Erwin Schulhoff’s Five Pieces for String Quartet (1923), the only composer of the program who had escaped Terezin—he died in Wolzburg back in 1942. His quartet, dedicated to Darius Milhaud and filled with jazz rhythms, turned out to be the most optimistic in terms of choreography as well. It is obvious that Sergeev, the leading soloist of the Mariinsky Theatre, simply cannot stage inconveniently for the actors – his classical combinations may not shine with originality, but they are logical, advantageous for the dancers and pleasing to the eye. Waltz, tango and other dances sounding in music were also reflected in the choreography, the highlight of which was the male jumping pas de quatre, in which a disguised ballerina participated on an equal footing. Behind her, as not corresponding to the norm, her colleagues gave chase; in the final, the girl, throwing off men’s clothes along the way and breaking through the paper screen on the back, nevertheless broke out of the generally accepted framework.

The tone of the evening went beyond the bounds of offering to the victims of the Holocaust, the result of which is essentially optimistic: the renewed Nizhny Novgorod troupe, which appeared in Moscow for the first time, looked young, active, blazing with enthusiasm, rather technical and untalented. In any case, in the choreography created especially for them. Obviously, for the future it remains to find reasonable domestic choreographers – and it is not at all necessary to use such journalistic arguments as the authors who died in concentration camps. Although this time their music turned out to be the most advantageous component of this unheard of – in the most literal sense of the word – program.