The 29th Benois de la danse award ceremony was held at the Historical Stage of the Bolshoi Theater

The Historical Stage of the Bolshoi Theater hosted the 29th Benois de la danse award ceremony and the traditional concert of this year’s nominees. Tells Tatyana Kuznetsova.

The international Benois de la danse, born in 1991 and going through various troubles, has received the most significant blows in recent years: in 2020 it was canceled by the pandemic, in 2022 by the NWO. The latter also destroyed the tandem of the ladies-founders of Benois: artistic director Nina Kudryavtseva-Luri, who was in charge of international relations and representativeness of the competition, resigned last spring, executive director Regina Nikiforova became the sole “chairman of the board.” The status of 96-year-old Yuri Grigorovich has also changed: the permanent chairman of the jury stopped judging, becoming president for life. The ballerina Svetlana Zakharova, who in 2021 has already gained valuable experience as a co-chair of the jury, took over the reins of government, including the artistic one.

It seems that the prima of the Bolshoi Theater considered it her main task to maintain the prestige of the “ballet Oscar” in the changed conditions – that is, to preserve the international character of the competition. Nowadays, this is achieved at the expense of Asia and Latin America: the former soloist of the Mariinsky Theater, Korean Tien Ryu, the chief choreographer of the National Ballet of China, Fei Bo, and the ballet artistic director of the Almaty Opera and Ballet Theater, Gulzhan Tutkibayeva, were invited to the jury. Russia was represented by independent Prime Minister Leonid Sarafanov, Brazil by Cecilia Kersh, ex-prima from Rio de Janeiro, Cuba by Viensay Valdez, General Director of the National Ballet. Names are important here, since it is the judges who nominate the prize nominees, usually by lobbying their artists and choreographers. This time, the Latin Americans showed amazing self-denial, not finding anyone worthy on the continent.

But the nominees were étoiles of the Paris Opera Dorothea Gilbert and Hugo Marchand for their debut in Macmillan’s Mayerling. They did not come to Moscow “because of employment”. And although it was not clear in the tiny video fragment presenting the artist what his friable pretentious Prince Rudolph was so good for, the jury made Marchand the winner, which allowed Benois de la danse to demonstrate a truly international breadth of views. Among the ballerinas, there were two laureates: Kang Mison from the Seoul Universal Ballet and Qiu Yunting from the National Ballet of China. Both performed in rather banal and uncomplicated duets about love and separation, and therefore their dance superiority over their competitors remained unobvious. But politically correct: otherwise the judges would have had to make a choice between the Bolshoi Theater (for which the sharp-legged Elizaveta Kokoreva performed in a duet from Wheeldon’s “Winter’s Tale”) and the Mariinsky (Petersburgers were represented by the graceful Japanese Mei Nagahisa, who danced the pas de deux from “Sleeping Beauty” so that the late Vaganova herself would have been satisfied).

The best choreographer of 2022 was named Vyacheslav Samodurov, who staged his daring “gold-mask” “Dancemania” at the Bolshoi. And although the sparkle of this ballet was considerably diminished at the concert due to the technical and acting constraint of the second cast of soloists, Dancemania looked more original than the works of competitors, judging by the tiny video fragments of the choreography of the Croatian Masha Kolar, the Chinese Li Jun and even the famous Wayne McGregor, who was nominated for ballet “Maddaddam”, staged by him at the National Ballet of Canada.

But if the competition still managed to maintain prestige in the presentation of the nominees and the selection of laureates, then in terms of the scenery of the concert, Benois de la danse demonstrated such provincial squalor that it is difficult to remember on the stage of the Bolshoi. Designers Stanislav Kirin and Sergey Timonin decorated the backdrop with projection paintings resembling gigantic aniline-colored market rugs. And the pas de deux were slaughtered in the bud: neither the height of the jumps, nor the accuracy of the pas, nor the lines of the adagio could be seen against the background of curly birches, roughly painted “palace” porticos or Roman triumphal arches, which for some reason served as a backdrop for the dance of the Parisian sans-culottes.

However, this ladle of tar did not spoil the honey of the ceremony itself: the decorators, who did not spare gold for the “ballet Oscar”, apparently sought to reproduce Hollywood chic. This analogy, reinforced by the red carpet that cut the stage and the text of the ballet presenters (soloists Ana Turazashvili and premier Artem Ovcharenko), written with attempts at humor, was intended to destroy the former officialdom. The ceremony, staged by Georgy Novikov and the chairperson herself, Svetlana Zakharova, really became livelier. The ballerina came up with a dance entre, in which students of different ages from the Moscow Academy in short sketches outlined the formation of the artist – from the first children’s tendu at the ballet barre to the ballerina’s adagio and, as it were, a modern duet.

Exactly “as if”: with the exception of the neoclassical laureate Samodurov, there was no modern choreography on the stage of the Bolshoi that evening. Everything presented, even the most recent (such as, for example, the duet “Where to Pour All My Love?” by the nominee Li Jun), threw back to the last century, to the time of the birth of the competition, when Soviet choreography was considered modern in our country due to the ignorance of Russians about world processes. It is noteworthy that even now judges from different countries have put forward exclusively classics for the competition, albeit arranged with local flavor. Perhaps they decided that the great traditions of Russian ballet require it. And for sure: they demand.