The Diaghilev PS festival ended in St. Petersburg

The XIV International Festival of Arts “Diaghilev PS”, which opened in St. Petersburg on November 11 with the musical program of Alexey Goribol “The Poet’s Love”, ended with two contrasting ballet evenings – Samara and Chinese. Tells Tatiana Kuznetsova.

The omnivorous spirit of impresario Sergei Diaghilev helps the festival maintain its international status even in our isolated times. Natalya Metelitsa, the creator and permanent director of Diaghilev PS, comes up with new twists and turns for festival plots, guided by Diaghilev’s famous motto “Surprise me!” In this context, the proximity of the Samara Opera and Ballet Theater, which is showing Armida’s Pavilion (a reconstruction of the hit of the first Parisian season of the Diaghilevites), and the modern company of the Chinese Xi Xing, who did not even think about Diaghilev, no longer seems strange. The author’s troupe Xie Xin Dance Theater, which came to Russia for the first time, is designed to surprise, primarily with the choreography of its leader: 38-year-old Xi Xing, a first-class People’s Artist in China, made her debut this fall with a world premiere at the Paris Opera (see “Kommersant” ” dated October 4) and is considered a rising star of world choreography.

However, the three-part program of the Samara residents, entitled “The Time of Nikita Dolgushin,” also did not insist on its own interpretation of Diaghilev’s legacy: it was an homage to one of the brightest and most original St. Petersburg residents, who built a fair part of his career as a dancer and choreographer outside the Northern capital. This esthete and passeist headed the Samara Ballet from 1997 to 2006, among other things reconstructing Bournonville’s “La Sylphide” and Fokine’s “Pavilion of Armida” – from artistic memory, without scientific research. The second act of “La Sylphide” and “Pavilion”, plastered by the current director of the troupe, Yuri Burlaka, was presented by well-bred Samara residents in St. Petersburg, showing in the second part the ossified choreography of the era of stagnation – fragments from the ballets of Igor Chernyshev and Dolgushin himself. Rare half-forgotten film shots of the dancing hero of the evening preceded each act – and became the only discovery. The ironic dandy-intellectual, who decorated his elegant classical dance with unusually graceful vignettes of hands and poses, so categorically did not fit into the heroic canon of Soviet ballet that the evening could have been called “The Timelessness of Nikita Dolgushin.”

Chinese artist Xi Xing also explores the “game of memories and time” in her “TIME” with music by Sylvian Wang. But her dance games do not concern the aesthetics of bygone eras. The ballet heroine indulges in personal memories, and the choreographer uses the traditions of national bodily practices and yoga as part of his professional training, seeking spiritual concentration and bodily perfection from his artists. Xi Xing’s choreographic language is Qigong-style, smooth, sinuous and continuous, and the dance phrases are Proustian-like endless. She puts an end to it only at the end of the episode, before the lights go out, weaving the characters into whimsical multi-figure compositions – like in a multi-layered carved Chinese ball. Long plastic passages flowing from the floor to the upper supports are performed by Chinese dancers as if they were breathing – with incredible synchronicity and weightless ease. Dressed in loose, intricately tailored trousers and fancy cardigans of different shades of physicality (costume designer Lee Kun), they form the perfect ensemble, in which each member subtly leads his own part, modestly remaining a part of the whole.

The ensemble is led by Xi Xing herself in the role of rememberer. In contrast to the abstract dance compositions, her “TIME” has a semblance of a plot frame and even stage accessories: chairs and beds hang from the grates, on the stage there is a table, a floor lamp and a “diary” book, leafing through which the heroine summons the ghosts of the past. These everydayisms served as a basis for the perception of TIME: it is easier to resist the meditative hypnosis of choreography when the heroine has a room, there are relationships with men (even imaginary ones), there are doubles left in the past, and today’s confusion of feelings, materialized by ensemble dance. Lighting designer Lou Shi Hou wonderfully built the stage world: from the modest rectangle of the “room” to the rigid square of the “ring of life”, from the darkness of troubles, when the conflicting outlines of a dancing couple are barely visible on the “unlit” stage, to the vast gray circle enclosing all human “memory”. The shortcomings of the performance include the abundance of false endings, each of which could well have ended the ballet, but this is the property of the current “Time”, which gives us different versions of past years.