The premiere of the Postscript 3.0 program took place at the Bolshoi Theater

The premiere of the evening of ballets of modern choreography Postscript 3.0 took place on the New Stage of the Bolshoi Theater. This is the third episode of the ballet program of the same name. The basis, that is, the ballet of the same name by the famous couple of choreographers from the Netherlands Paul Layfoot and Sol Leon Postscript, after which, in fact, the whole evening was named, as well as the ballet of another famous European choreographer – the Moroccan Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, “Faun”, remained in the program still.

To these two undoubted hits, an excellent ballet “Francesca da Rimini” to the music of Tchaikovsky was added as the opening ballet of the evening. Re-staged for the project of Yuri Baranov and his company MuzArts back in 2016, the ballet turned out to be so successful that it simply begs to be included in the Bolshoi playbill. However, it is, alas, almost impossible to see him in Moscow.

This time there was only one premiere novelty in the project – the ballet “Four” by choreographer of Albanian origin Eno Peci, now working as a ballet soloist and choreographer at the Vienna Opera. According to the organizers of the evening, “there was no particular need to choose from among the foreign choreographers of the project: they chose the one who was not afraid and agreed to come and work with Russian dancers.” It is impossible to say that the choreographer is completely unknown in Russia: about seven years ago he took part in the laboratory of young choreographers “Intersection Point” at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater, but did not create anything noteworthy even then.

Actually, the current ballet “Four” was not particularly original. Four or five movements for the entire ballet formed its basis and were endlessly repeated for 45 minutes in a variety of combinations, testing the audience’s patience. The dynamic cuts from Vivaldi’s works, arranged by Max Richter, did not help either, who managed to “process” his works in such a way that they lost all their brilliant airiness and poetry.

“The history of the development of a person’s inner world and the formation of his personality through interaction with other people and nature. Four seasons, four centuries of civilization and four stages of human development” (this is how the organizers of the evening described the main idea of ​​this ballet in the booklet) were boring and monotonous. No four seasons, four centuries of civilization and other “quadruple”, except for the banal four dancers engaged in ballet and beautifully dancing modern choreography on stage, were not read in the choreography of the Furnace. Moreover, the media content presented by video artist Oleg Serebryakov and the lighting design made by Ivan Vinogradov did not help in any way to clarify the meaning, and sometimes even confused it.

Volcanic eruptions, fluctuations in sea water and tsunamis, and then oil rigs, turbines and other signs of human activity appearing on three giant screens, even if they symbolized different stages of human intervention in natural processes and warned of an environmental disaster, they did it too straightforwardly and to the point. didn’t make it clear. The costumes of fashion designer Alexander Terekhov, who was making his debut in the ballet, did not help to clarify it either; they were designed in black and white and made from some kind of advanced super-weightless fabric, supposedly capable of changing color depending on the lighting. But in the process, the designer never demonstrated this promise.

The ballet was saved by the performers who conveyed in their dance different states of their mental movements and experiences: from the birth of a bright, beautiful, pure and sincere feeling that is transformed in dance to complete chaos and destruction. The emphasis in this ballet, as, in fact, in the entire Postscript 3.0 program, was on the dancer of the TODES pop ensemble Ildar Gainutdinov. However, Daniil Potaptsev, who graduated from the Eifman Academy and excellently performs the classics, looked at least as good in the modern choreography of Eno Pechi, and in some ways even more advantageous.

The dance of the three soloists of the Bolshoi Theater (Maria Vinogradova, Anastasia Denisova, Daniil Potaptsev) and Ildar Gainutdinov involved in the ballet made the idea, which became the main one in another ballet shown in Postscript 3.0, central. It was embodied in the words from the final part of “Paradise” of the final 33rd canto of Dante’s poem: “Love moves the sun and other stars”… It is the feeling of Love that ultimately wins in the chaos of Eno Pechi’s choreography and in the dance of the four performers on stage.

The epigraph to Yuri Possokhov’s ballet “Francesca da Rimini” was taken from other words from Dante’s “Divine Comedy”: “Love, which commands loved ones to love,/I was so powerfully attracted to him,/That you see this captivity indestructible…” (“Hell”, song 5). It is based on one of the eternal images of European culture – the tragic love story of Francesca and Paolo, captured in the fifth song of the Inferno of Dante’s Divine Comedy… To the music of Tchaikovsky’s symphonic fantasy of the same name, created at the same time when the composer was working and over Swan Lake, starting with Mikhail Fokin’s production at the Mariinsky Theater in 1915; who hasn’t staged this ballet?

The former Bolshoi premier and now resident choreographer of the San Francisco Ballet, Yuri Posokhov, is also successfully developing this theme. He staged his ballet for this troupe back in 2012, and, transferred to the stage of the Bolshoi Theater, it was extremely successful for Svetlana Zakharova, who decided to try on the image of Francesca on stage. Unfortunately, Zakharova did not take part in the current program, and two performers debuted in the role of Francesca in two casts – Elizaveta Kokoreva in the first cast and Anastasia Stashkevich in the second, which I saw. The last role of the heroine of Dante’s immortal poem was very suitable, as, indeed, the roles of almost all other participants in the play were suitable: Francesca’s young lover Paolo was perfectly performed by the Bolshoi Theater soloist Klim Efimov (Aleksey Putintsev was in the first cast in this role), and the role of Paolo’s brother Gianciotto, the legal spouse of Francesca, the tyrannical and ugly ruler of Rimini (the story told by Dante in the 12th century had real prototypes) was performed by Ildar Gainutdinov, who still lacked dramatic expressiveness in this role.

In addition to the three main characters, there is a corps de ballet, which carries the function of reflecting their psychological state and inner world. It is made up of five court ladies dressed in stylish blood-red dresses and three “guardians of hell” in gray muscle tights who guard the “Gates of Hell”, created for the performance based on the famous sculptural composition by Rodin. In general, reminiscences from Rodin’s works (and Rodin’s famous “Kiss,” we recall, was also inspired by the same plot) undoubtedly embellished and deepened the symbolic imagery of the ballet. And in the picture of a hellish funnel made of the bodies of people flying into it, displayed on the backdrop, quotes from Rodin’s works are also used.

In the ballet “Francesca da Rimini” everything came together: the introduction of new performers; and the still impressive costumes by fashion designer Igor Chapurin; and the beautiful choreography of Yuri Posokhov, based on the classics, who organically translated Dante’s terzas into choreographic language in his 25-minute ballet, and has duets of the main characters of rare beauty and expressiveness. Finally, I was impressed by the work of the production designer of this ballet, Maria Tregubova, who built on the backdrop a grandiose picture of the second circle of the hellish abyss, where fragments of human bodies and the souls of people entwined in an eternal kiss, whose minds have been darkened by love passion, rush into the devilish funnel in a fantastic whirlwind.

So if the premiere novelty “Four” did not become an organic part of the otherwise excellently composed and highly successful hit program of modern ballets and did not add new colors to it, it needs some refinement and reduction, then the old-new ballet “Francesca da Rimini” Postscript 3.0 , undoubtedly decorated.