The Yakobson Theater presented a new ballet by Vyacheslav Samodurov

On the stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater, the St. Petersburg Jacobson Ballet Theater presented the premiere of Vyacheslav Samodurov’s ballet “598 bars” to the music of Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach. Passionate about the dance, she didn’t count the beats Tatiana Kuznetsova.

Vyacheslav Samodurov made his debut as a choreographer in 2010 with the one-act “Minor Sonatas” and immediately received recognition: all these years, critics did not skimp on praise, and “Golden Masks” rained down. However, in the opinion of the Kommersant observer, Samodurov gained real creative freedom only in recent years, when he decided (and decided) to throw off the burden of artistic director of the Yekaterinburg ballet. Starting with “The Gift” (2021), his favorite plotless one-act pieces are distinguished by a kind of reckless dance flow, which has washed away traces of those tortured combinations with which the choreographer previously proved his originality. The Yakobson Ballet Theater also got into the stream of recent successes, having acquired Samodurov’s “Mischievous Ditties” (see “Kommersant” dated December 19, 2022). At Alexandrinka, this exciting work opened a three-part evening, and “598 bars” concluded it.

The style of choreographer Samodurov is distinguished by stable patterns. The author, a graduate of the Vaganova Academy and a classical premiere in the past, is based on the classics, but likes to reduce the “high calm” with common vernacular, a kind of swing on the dance floor. He prefers to split up classical forms: he gives parts of the variation to different performers, in the adagio he launches a parallel non-synchronized pair, and he often makes the codes massive. Academic virtuosity like tours and fouettés Samodurov either sets off self-irony – as if he puts quotation marks when quoting standard steps, or ironically ends the cascade of tricks with the soloist’s hasty escape from the stage or, as it were, an offstage exhalation – with a hunched back and relaxation of the limbs. All this relieves his ballets of pathos, making them very dynamic (regardless of the musical tempo) and unpredictable, which is facilitated by the fundamental asymmetry of the overall pattern, coupled with intonation and plastic surprises.

These properties of the author brought Shchedrin’s “Ditties” and “Tacts” of Bach the Son closer together. Moreover, in both cases, the choreographer relied on seven soloists, deliberately not singling out the main ones from the flock of their active colleagues – neither with a noticeably larger portion of dance, nor with costumes (in the new ballet, artist Elena Trubetskaya dressed the soloists completely identically: in flesh-colored leotards with elongated , like “boxer shorts”, briefs and darker inserts on the chest and back). However, the rapprochement did not lead to similarity. The musicality of the choreographer, who found different stylistic, mise-en-scène and plastic solutions for the mischievous comedy of “Ditties” and the ceremonial humor of “598 bars” (that’s how many there are in the early classical piano concerto No. 19 of Bach the Son), made it possible to avoid the risk of self-repetition.

Ceremony, however, in this ballet is conventional, as are the signs of the 18th century: powdered footmen in camisoles, solemnly bringing chairs, candelabra, or vases, rather a living interior. Their leisurely fashion shows mark the semantic boundaries of the scenes of this plotless ballet, in which, however, quite readable stories of flirtation, rivalry and even failed love are visible. There is some paradox in the fact that the instrumental choreographer made the culmination not of dance, but of pantomime: in the middle, slow part of Bach’s concerto, the characters, sitting decorously on chairs, exchange eloquent glances, pretending to drink tea. “Tea Party” launches a series of playful maneuvers in the form of fruitless attempts to sit in one chair while maintaining decorum; use your partner’s back as a table, reach for an imaginary cup, putting your arm around your partner’s shoulders. However, the choreographer’s attempt to go beyond the usual competence of the weather does not make any difference: the main thing in this ballet is still the dance, and not the relationships of the main soloists, whom the author failed to endow with features so bright that they turned into characters.

As for the dance, it flows like a river here, virtuoso and insidious in its apparent ease. Familiar classical steps, slightly transformed, acquire unexpected eloquence. Thus, a small “cutting” brise jump, performed large, high, in a circle and with great advancement across the stage, looks like an angry rebuke. And the ballerina, throwing herself “like a fish” into the arms of her partner, at the last moment turns her stomach down and, instead of freezing in her pose, continues to “swim”, producing small waves with her body. The wit of the movements in this ballet is much more resourceful than pantomime jokes; the young artists of the troupe perfectly understand and can convey the nature of the choreographer’s humor. Having passed the “copper pipes” of his fast-paced, technically complex “Ditties,” here they chirp freely in Samodurov’s language, flaunting the precision of steps and the eloquence of phrases. “598 bars” became another trump card received by the Jacobson Ballet Theater in our time, which is meager in successful deals. The next performance is expected in Moscow: in July, the Bolshoi Theater will show the premiere of Samodurov’s “The Tempest,” a multi-act ballet based on Shakespeare to specially written music by Yuri Krasavin. And this is where the game gets big.