The Stanislavsky Theater showed a ballet based on Carroll’s fairy tale “Alice Through the Looking-Glass”

Konstantin Semyonov – winner of the contemporary choreography contest “Context. Diana Vishneva” and the All-Russian competition of ballet dancers and choreographers, a participant in the projects of the Bolshoi Theater “Faces”, “Dance-platforms” of the Yekaterinburg theater “Ural Opera Ballet”, director of ballets in Russia and Japan. In his native theater back in 2016, he staged the ballet Variations and Quartet for the experimental workshop of modern choreography Point of Intersection, and last year for Program No. 1 he transferred his ballet Andantino. The Dream of a Butterfly”, which became one of the most successful in this evening. If all previous productions in the theater were “small” by Konstantin, then “Through the Looking Glass” is a full-fledged one-act 70-minute ballet, in which both the theater soloists and the corps de ballet participate – only 23 people.

As the basis of his new performance, the choreographer took the fairy tale of the English mathematician and writer Lewis Carroll “Through the Looking-Glass” – a work intended not only for children, but in many respects paradoxical, full of riddles, charades and shifters. After the phenomenal success of Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice in Wonderland at the Royal Ballet of England in 2011, recourse to Carroll’s fairy tales (particularly his first tale, Alice in Wonderland) has become quite common in ballet theater in the last decade. But in order to make this complex work understandable and exciting for a children’s audience, the director needs to make the ballet colorful, both in terms of decoration and choreography. Which is not at all easy, both for economic (large monetary costs for staging) and for artistic reasons.

Since the ballet by Konstantin Semyonov was staged for a small stage, the scenery of Maria Tregubova turned out to be forcedly modest, but the scene created by the artist for the dream scene of the Black Crow King, controlled by dancers with the help of sticks, turned out to be fantastic. The group dressed in black, almost invisible in the appropriate lighting, is clearly inspired by John Neumeier’s ballet The Little Mermaid, previously performed at Stasik. It was there that the world famous choreographer used elements of the traditional Japanese theater Bunraku, No and Kabuki to create a fantasy world.

Konstantin Semyonov and Maria Tregubova often use borrowings to create the paradoxical world of the Looking Glass. In particular, from the ballets of Jiri Kilian: the black queen’s skirt on wheels refers to his ballet “Little Death”, which is still going on in the theater. And the scene where hands, legs, heads appear and disappear from the slits of the screen is from another classic ballet – Insomnia, which was once performed in Stasik.

Semyonov, like Kilian in his ballet, seeks to transfer the viewer to the border of the unconscious. After all, the continuation of Carroll’s first book, Alice in Wonderland, is based on a chess game. Playing chess with children, the author came up with amusing stories in which the moves of various pieces were played out. Therefore, you need to have extraordinary erudition in order to understand the true meaning of this rather complex work in all respects.

“Alice”, written in 1865 (the second part in 1871), has not yet revealed all its secrets. Einstein’s theory of relativity, the paradoxes of space and time, quantum physics had not yet been invented, but in some incomprehensible way were reflected in this work. And in Carroll’s fairy tale, time, for example, is not an absolute, just like Einstein’s, it can shrink, expand: a brief moment contains exhausting hours of waiting, which can suddenly “collapse” into one moment.

Did not want to simplify this work and Konstantin Semyonov. According to the choreographer, “the text of Carroll’s book, being in itself the main character,” he “defined the direction of the search and set tasks.” The director wanted to “avoid illustrativeness”, and in order to convey the complexity of the work, he decided to present it as an “intellectual puzzle”, “to create for the heroine and the viewer a field of intense misunderstanding, within which time, space, iconic characters, a fairy tale and its reflection in our own intersect. mirror.”

Such an idea led to an unnecessary complication of the children’s performance, and so, according to Carroll’s fairy tale, reminiscent of an “intellectual puzzle”. Therefore, when during the very first show of the premiere, the prima ballerina Ksenia Ryzhkova was injured and could not perform in the final scene, the girl Alice was replaced by Valeria Mukhanova, who performed the part of the adult Alice in the same performance, and the director’s idea underwent spontaneous changes not envisaged by the choreographer and brought confusion to the finale.

Nevertheless, many heroes of the fairy tale, such as the Black King and the Black Queen, the White Queen, the twin brothers Tweedledum and Tweedledum (in the ballet they differ in the color of their jackets), the herds of Unicorns dancing in the ballet are quite recognizable. However, not all. If you guess that lions are dancing in a duel with the same Unicorns, then you can understand that Alice is dating Lanya only by knowing the content of the fairy tale or by looking into the program with the scenario plan ..

Many of the scenes are simply brilliant. For example, the scene when Alice, according to the content of the tale, rides the train to the third chess cell. Particularly impressive is one of the first scenes of the play – the scene of Alice’s entry into the Looking Glass. To do this, the choreographer provided for two Alice at once, which are performed by two ballerinas: an adult Alice appears on stage in a blue dress, red high-heeled shoes, with a red bag, in a small red hat; and Alice, a girl dressed very similar, but with a different hairstyle (baby ponytail), without a purse and hat, and also in children’s shoes without heels. All the same dancers dressed in black are carrying two triangular platforms to meet each other. On them – almost no different Alice in similar red armchairs. Nearby are identical lamps with a green shade. The platforms are connected in a quadrangular structure, which the dancers in black twist while running in a circle.

For the new work, the theater specially ordered music from the composer Vasily Peshkov. She also contributed to immersion in the mysterious atmosphere of another reality behind the mirror and helped the artists involved in the production to create fantastic and multidimensional characters of Carroll’s fairy tale. This is Evgeny Zhukov (in the first cast), as well as German Borsai (in the second), dancing in the performance of both Carroll himself and his characters – the Black Queen and the Black King, whose dream turns out to be everything that happens in a fairy tale and ballet. This is an adult Alice performed by Valeria Mukhanova (Polina Zayarnaya in the second cast) and Alisa-girl Ksenia Ryzhkova (Anastasia Limenko in the second cast). The role of the White Queen, as well as the magical white Lani in the performance in two different casts, was played by the same actress – Elena Solomyanko – she turned out to be so good in these parts. It is impossible not to mention Yuri Vybornov and Innokenty Yuldashev, who created the memorable images of the twin brothers Tweedledum and Tweedledum, and Innokenty Yuldashev also the image of Humpty Dumpty (in the second cast this role was perfectly performed by Evgeny Dubrovsky).

The scene with Humpty Dumpty also turned out to be one of the most successful in the ballet. Humpty Dumpty, wearing an egg-shaped hat (in Carroll, this character resembles a large humanoid egg with a tie) spectacularly appears upstairs with his famous monologue, which is heard offstage: “Humpty Dumpty was sitting on the wall. / Humpty Dumpty fell in his sleep. / All the royal cavalry, all the royal army, / Humpty can’t / Dumpty can’t gather. And his dance-meeting with Alice takes place, and then “all the royal men” dance. The performance ends with a paradoxical feast at an empty table covered only with a white tablecloth and Alice’s coronation. Having stepped on the eighth cell, she, as in a fairy tale, turns out to be a queen, and her journey through the looking-glass is a dream.