Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg, the revolutionary Russian dance
company whose performances are in stark contrast to classical
ballet troupes like Bolshoi and Kirovthey, will make its debut on
the Chinese mainland with two thrilling performances at the Great
Hall of the People on Friday and Saturday.
Participating in the Third Beijing International Dance Festival,
which opens on Thursday, Eifman Ballet will stage Tchaikovsky:
The Mystery of Life and Death on Friday and Russian
Hamlet: The son of Catherine the Great on Saturday.
Although both titles may sound familiar to theater-goers, the
theater's unique performances are miles from the well-known classic
Russian ballet troupes. The company has adopted a style that
combines avant-garde dance with methods of the 20th century
dramatic theater and film to create more extroverted pieces like
those by Roland Petit and Maurice Bejart.
Perspective views
Tchaikovsky: The Mystery of Life and Death explores the
great dilemma of the Russian composer, who craved acceptance and
regard, yet was drawn to his inner desires that both appalled and
enthralled him.
Boris Eifman, choreographer of the ballet, as well as founder
and director of the company, depicts Tchaikovsky and his inner
torments, among them repressed homosexuality and his conflicting
desires for fame and rebellion.
Eifman smoothly knits together themes from Tchaikovsky's best-known
orchestral, ballet and opera music, blending narrative themes of
the composer's life, though choreography from such Tchaikovsky
ballet classics as Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and
The Nutcracker are absent.
Meanwhile, the ballet Russian Hamlet: The Son of Catherine
the Great is based very loosely on the story of Prince Paul,
the unhappy son of Catherine the Great, and Czar of Russia. It sets
Paul's innocence and vulnerability to corruption and domination by
his mother and her debauched court.
There always seems to be some sort of complex issue running
between mother and son, and this story gives Eifman a big chance to
incorporate psychoanalysis.
Eifman gives his view of Paul through his choreography and
somehow rehabilitates the prince.
"Personally I am sympathetic to him. Hamlet's mother loved her
son; Paul hated and feared her. It is a fact that Paul thought he
saw the ghost of his murdered father, Peter III. He was not mad,
but he imagined things and when he became Czar, he stayed in that
fantasy world.
"He couldn't battle his genetic make-up. ... He was harsh and
difficult to deal with, but that was also because he wanted to
advance his ideas too quickly, to achieve progress in Russia," said
the choreographer.
"Catherine saw Paul as her son, but she also saw him as the man
who wanted to take her power. And to explore this in my ballet, I
had to find movement that would suggest Catherine's strong
personality, but also the many conflicting feelings she had inside
her."
For the score of Act One, Eifman chooses Beethoven's First,
Third, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies plus Egmont Overture and Piano
Sonata No 14, because, as he explained, "Beethoven's music suggests
the power, the energy and the heroic feeling of the Russian empire,
and also because Catherine and Paul had German blood."
The ballet is less a historical piece, however, than it is an
imagistic study of a dysfunctional relationship told through
dancing.
Many Russian historians would dispute Eifman's notions of Paul a
tyrant by almost anyone's definition is of little concern to him.
His ballets are not designed to be an exploration of historical
truth, but the emotional truth of the characters he has created, he
said.
"I am not interested in an illustration of history or an
external story," he added. "I want to show how Paul's light
personality becomes degraded, how he broke under the pressure of
his mother, her decomposing environment and espionage. Prince Paul
was gifted with a surprising capacity of imagination. His world of
surprising fantasies encouraged me to create this performance. This
is a world that only ballet can express."
Emotional experience
Both works that Eifman Ballet brings to Beijing exemplify a kind
of amalgamation of reality and fantasy, which is one of Eifman's
strongest emotional methods in choreography.
"My theater is a theater of open emotional experience. Creating
my mystery where the characters live by my rules, I'm creating my
own world with its catastrophes. This is my own cardiogram, the
rhythm of my pulse, its eruptions, shocks, culminations, ups and
downs," said Eifman, who is acclaimed as a philosopher in
choreography.
He experiments with such dark and dangerous spheres as the human
psyche, and many of his ballets become examples of scenic
psychoanalysis. He strives to show extreme conditions of a human
being, considering madness not a disease but an ability to transfer
to the worlds of fantasies and mirages.
Born in 1946 in Siberia where his parents had been exiled,
Eifman enrolled in the choreography department of the Leningrad
Conservatory when he was 20 and then became the choreographer of
the Vaganova Academy, the Kirov Ballet's school.
In 1977, he founded Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg, and managed
to sustain its artistic and financial independence alongside such
State-run companies as the Bolshoi and the Kirov.
From the start, Eifman had a very specific mission to
revolutionize the concept of classical dance in Russia by
integrating elements of modern dance, avant-garde dramatic theater
and the montage aspects of film.
"All my artistic life I wanted to give a new possibility to
dance," Eifman said. "I wanted to prove that it can explain very
deep human emotions, that it can be a message from the soul and the
psyche, and that it also can express very deep philosophical
ideas."
(China Daily January 9, 2006)
