Small fraction – Newspaper Kommersant No. 38 (7483) dated 03/06/2023

On the Small Stage of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, the first performance of The Golden Mask was presented in the Modern Dance nomination – Tatyana Chizhikova’s solo project Fractional Move, which collected four nominations. Tatyana Kuznetsova believes that the experts have been overly generous.

This year’s contemporary dance competition is modest: only five titles. Except for “Fractional Move”, all the performances are not from Moscow. The only hit of the capital’s season – “Summer, Winter and … Rite of Spring”, a crowded and complex performance to the music of Frank Moon and Igor Stravinsky, staged by the British Portuguese Arthur Pita for the Ballet Moscow – was not included in the competition by experts; may have been shocked by this bountiful carnival macabre (see Kommersant dated August 28, 2021). As a result, almost all projects on the Maska poster turned out to be chamber (solo or duets) and, in accordance with the feminist agenda, ladies’ (only the Kazan D?R was the fruit of the joint work of Maria and Marcel Nureyev). Moreover, only three performances out of five will be shown in Moscow: two Petersburgers Ksenia Mikheeva and Olga Tsvetkova did not find a suitable venue in the capital.

The “Fractional Move” that opened the competition, in addition to the main nomination, was nominated for the work of the choreographer and the best female role (in both roles Tatyana Chizhikova), and Roman Malyavkin was nominated for the work of the composer, who supported the performance of the protagonist on the accordion. Together with the playwright Anna Semenova-Ganz (in tandem with whom she already received a special “Mask” “for the search for a new artistic language in the play “Drummer”) Tatyana Chizhikova, extremely sensibly for the creators of modern dance, formulated the essence of the project: “what does it mean to be Russian and what kind of Russian to be” in modern times. Reflections are based on the elements of Russian folk dance. “These movements my body learned many years ago at a different time and in a different context. This time and context are irretrievably gone. What’s left? asks Tatyana Chizhikova.

Assessing the quantity and quality of the analyzed movements, it is appropriate to ask a counter question: what happened? The most impressive thing about this choreography is the pauses. Tatyana Chizhikova, dressed in black breeches, a black collarless shirt and black folk-specific high heels, knows how to stand motionless on an empty stage for a long time, with dignity and so impressively that a fly will not fly in the hall. As for dance reflections, they are – perhaps intentionally, and not from the paucity of the studied heritage – elementary and revealingly obvious. As the abstract of the report. For example, the first is a Russian greeting that turned into humiliation: the performer, hands on hips, leans forward, but does not stop at the waist bow – she brings her head to her feet, trying to stick it through her bent knees. The second thesis is actually a “fractional move” on half-fingers with tapping the heel on the floor, literally leading to a dead end: after walking down the stage, Tatyana Chizhikova rests against the wall and stomps her heels for half a minute, without moving; hands, at first proudly resting their fists on their sides, are powerlessly dropped along the torso. The third movement is the adapted “hammers”: deprived of the proper kick to the floor, they turned into a kind of running on the spot with the shins thrown back, while the metaphor “without a rudder, without sails” is illustrated by circular movements of the hands, complemented by a wave of a white handkerchief. The fourth step is men’s “crackers”: sluggish slaps with hands, which do not really hit either the thighs or the shoulders, lose all daring, but with some imagination they can be mistaken for self-flagellation. Finally, the fifth and final thesis is spinning with outstretched arms and “crouching”: impurely executed, this traditional symbol of female euphoria easily turns into a sign of loss of orientation.

Assessing the clarity of expression and the asceticism of the author’s expressive means, we can welcome the nomination of this 40-minute project for the Golden Mask. But still, the experts, who took the alternation of elementary, only slightly transformed movements of Russian dance for “the best work of a choreographer”, showed excessive respect for the theme of performance. And thus devalued the merits of the original choreographers competing with Tatyana Chizhikova in this nomination.

In the “Fractional Move”, the performer found a rival in the “Best Role” section. Not only did the composer Roman Malyavkin work wonders with his accordion, extracting the most amazing sounds from it – from the barely audible whistle of a boiling kettle to the organ roar of natural disasters. Not only did he transform folk themes with marvelous, inventive and desperate courage, but the power of his temperament and skill fully compensated for the scarcity of the visual range. In the finale, when, having disentangled himself from the straps of the accordion, setting it on the floor and crawling away from the instrument, Roman made it sound as if on its own with a piercing fading longing, the musician was extremely expressive and plastic – so much so that he made me forget about the emasculated choreographic rhetoric of the project. If he were nominated as the best dancer, it would seem more justified than the nomination of Tatyana Chizhikova as a dancer.