Shalyai-Boltai – Newspaper Kommersant No. 66 (7511) of 04/17/2023

On the Small Stage of the Musical Theater named after Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, the premiere of the one-act ballet Through the Looking-Glass, staged by Konstantin Semenov to the original music by Vasily Peshkov based on Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking-Glass, took place. The absurdity of this 70-minute ballet has driven to a standstill Tatyana Kuznetsova.

Konstantin Semenov, a ballet dancer at the Stanislavsky Music Theatre, a graduate of the ballet master department of the Moscow State Academy of Arts, strengthened by the tutelage of the conservatory professor Yuri Abdokov, first appeared in the ballet master field as a student 13 years ago. Since then, he, an active participant in various progressive projects, has been tirelessly looking for his own style in the range from classical vocabulary to pantomime “revival” of David’s sculpture. In the last year, forced ballet import substitution gave him, like other Russian choreographers, an invaluable chance to establish himself in the repertory troupe. The chance is all the more real because the French artistic director of the Stanislavsky Music Theater Laurent Hilaire was replaced by a young artist-choreographer Maxim Sevagin, who relied on small-sized domestic exclusives. Last year, in Program No. 1, Konstantin Semenov made his debut on the main stage of the Museum Theater with a miniature to the music of Franz Schubert “Andantino. The Dream of a Butterfly”, whose entire modernity consisted in “armored” costumes of insects.

He developed the dream theme in Through the Looking Glass, setting out to find a choreographic analogue of Carroll’s “intellectual puzzle” and create “a field of intense misunderstanding, within which time, space, iconic characters, possible situations, a fairy tale and its reflection in our own mirror intersect.” The task, of course, is not childish, but in terms of “intense misunderstanding”, the author partly solved it. It is not clear, for example, why there are two Alice and how they differ from each other. They are dressed alike in white stockings and blue dresses with ruffles, like the artist Carroll John Tenniel; they dance about the same thing; both communicate on equal terms with the characters of the Looking Glass (the choreographer divided Carroll’s fairy tale into 15 isolated episodes). Perhaps it’s just that Alice (Valeria Mukhanova) is more static – she wanders longer through the smoky darkness of the Looking-Glass, looking around frightened and shying away from the characters, while Alice the girl (Ksenia Ryzhkova) starts dancing without pantomime preludes. But the differences are not so significant that one could suspect something was wrong when Ksenia was seriously injured, could not complete the ballet and Valeria took her place in the final.

The direction is also incomprehensible: all the actors (with the exception of the charmingly buffoonish Elena Solomyanko as the White Queen) maintain a stony expression in any circumstances, which is why their characters differ only in costumes, like, say, Lewis Carroll, the Black King and the Black Queen. Perhaps Prime Minister Yevgeny Zhukov, who performed all three parts, does not like the indistinct choreography (and he can be understood), but nevertheless the acting position obliges to indicate at least the difference in characters. However, Konstantin Semenov makes the work of the actors difficult in every possible way – both as a director, who does not know how to build a mise-en-scène, and as a choreographer, who has a very meager set of movements. For example, he hides the bully Humpty Dumpty, who turns concepts inside out, behind a high wall, like Petrushka behind a puppet screen, and strictly normalizes his gestures, forcing Innokenty Yuldashev to behave like a broken puppet. This episode is accompanied by the famous Carroll text. Therefore, the gulf between the virtuosity of a literary original and the squalor of its choreographic equivalent opens up especially irreparably, eclipsing all the other stupidities of the performance (like vampire bites on the neck, through which the artists depicting chess pieces “eat” each other).

Companions of Konstantin Semenov tried their best. The artist Maria Tregulova, for example, came up with a wonderful “black crow” – a gigantic cane puppet controlled by half a dozen artists. But the director never managed to play it, almost immediately breaking it into its component parts and drowning the fragments of the “crow” in the stage darkness. Electronic composer Vasily Peshkov showed a rare variety, composing not only the declared “quasi-medieval” and “quasi-baroque” music, but also quasi-pop, and even quasi-ethnographic, but the choreographer did not use the stylistic range, even managing to produce something like a marching cancan to the mazurka.

Of course, it is a pity for the excellent artists who not so long ago danced Kilian, Eyal, Gökke, and now they are forced not only to perform, but also to receive injuries for such an insignificant choreographic reason. It is also a pity for the spectators who, deceived by the name, will lead the children to this “Through the Looking-Glass”, burned in the smoky bonfires of the author’s ambitions. It is also a pity for those who hope that Russian choreography is able not only to drag staging techniques from Western luminaries (like a crinoline on wheels, which migrated to the Black Queen straight from Kilian’s Little Death), but also to develop an independent artistic language. But what to do: in essence, “Through the Looking Glass” is a little worse than other modern ballets. It is only a mirror image of the current artistic reality.