The story about the life of a legendary ballet personality, moreover, with a tragic fate and a long period of insanity, guarantees comprehensibility, accessibility and interest, and thus attention from the big stages. In turn, the form and ideas embedded in the show allow you to bring the qualities of the camera format to the big stages. I like ballet Nizhny Novgorod to experience up close, in a hall with some two hundred seats, to see the ends of the dancers’ tongue face and feel the body, which travels through those parts of the body, which classical dance pretends not to see. On the other hand, the opportunity to enjoy a work of art up to the full in the opera hall, especially after the pandemic years, is exclusive. Such an environment shows even more vividly that ballet Nizhny Novgorod is an fact of art, because there is no indifference – some spectators leave the hall after about half an hour, some artists greet with standing towels. The advantage of the big stage is that those who have open sexuality – mostly among men – may think that it is just a symbolic illustration of the play of power and creative energy. Unfortunately, Filip Fedulov, who plays the role of Diaghilev, is sometimes too carnal – his hands are shifted by Nizhnyski, played by guest artist Maurice Gotty, with a small but safe distance. This slightly overshadows the possibility of fully tasting the corporeality of Geke’s ballet.
The corporeality of dance
This wine has a rich body or flesh. Its connoisseurs tend to describe wine. Also for ballet Nizhny Novgorod is a tangible and tactile body. Although the show is made up of ten scenes with references to Nizhynsk’s biography and more or less specific characters (from Diaghilev to Spares, Something and Dancing to Terpsihora), fears about the fragmentation of the play quickly fade away. An hour and a half runs fast, the content message is not intrusive, the work can also be enjoyed as an abstract dance with separate theatrical elements that enrich the production, demonstrating how choreographic thinking can turn both text, pantomime and voice into dance. It is masterful to work with the choreography of everyday life and the voice as a muscle with strength variations.
Nizhynski could not help but dance, he could not be an artist. At the same time, the starting point – the school of classical ballet – is the space from which his spirit and body break out. Although I don’t hear laughter in the hall, I find a number of episodes charmingly comical – like an authentic dance as an expression of the soul that transcends the boundaries of form; as an everyday gesture, cleverly repeated and rhythmized, turns into an expressive dance phrase. It is a feature that can also be seen in Nizhynsk’s own choreography – a nuance, a turning point that unexpectedly paints an episode or takes over whole scenes at full power. Want – laugh, want – get angry, want – look, want – turn away.
It is amazing how much can be said on the basis of the same form of ballet that was lost in despair at the beginning of the 20th century. Think – if not avant-garde Russian seasons, there would be no classical ballet today. Ballet reforms gave new blood to the art of ballet. It is a pity that they soon forgot again. That is why the work, which is reminiscent of this historical period and is in modern language, is all the more welcome.
The flow of harmony
The relationship between choreography and music is interesting. The music of Claude Debussy and Frederic Chopin, conducted by Aivis Gretters, sounds like a single, harmoniously flowing river. Quite ironically, knowing how different the rhythmically complex and anxious Igor Stravinsky is Holy Spring music – it is this work of Nizhny Novgorod that has become both an icon of modernist dance and a vivid example of public revolt at the premiere.
Choreography is extremely musical to my eyes, but it certainly does not accompany the music and does not reproduce the images that could be created by allowing the flow of harmony. From the very beginning of the show, there is anxiety and tension in the movement, which is achieved with fast hand movements that reach the finger and nail tips, nuanced broken lines or simply statics, despite the sound of the flow of the landscape. I admit that this harmonious disharmony between dance and music is one of the most important reasons for keeping attention. I have not yet seen Aiden William Conephry and Kristaps Jaunžeikars in the role of Nizhny Novgorod, but the Hanover State Ballet soloist Maurus Gotti is living both Nizhny Novgorod’s life and Geke’s choreography. Estere Dresene-Shabaka’s drama is also sensitive and loyal to choreography and dance, it does not try to explain anything too much.
Technique and aesthetics
Ballet vocabulary in the show Nizhny Novgorod is portrayed not only through formal changes in lines and positions, but also through gender neutrality and sexuality. Thus, the wide choreographic potential of the classical dance technique becomes visible, as long as the author is able to distinguish the technique from aesthetics, is able to give tulle wings to both man and woman, is able to reveal intimacy between men, is able to hide sexuality as a life, creativity and destruction.
Nizhny Novgorod is a song of fame for an unadorned ballet – simple black pants for everyone, regardless of gender, only one fur collar for Djagilev, who, although the driving force of the new ballet, is at the same time an old school sign, both counting “raz, dva, tri, four” and digging dancers and other forms of insensitivity. The props appear when the body becomes inadequate – the petals of the rose of fame and schizophrenia that burst with an explosion, a club chair and at the end a pencil to draw circles and circles and circles. It all ends when you can no longer help. When the body no longer gives an answer, a solution, a turn, a snort, or a whisper. You squat and crawl, and you see that there are only circles. No matter how much energy is put into work to turn and turn and touch the soul through the body, after a while everything will be old again. The body no longer has the power to give answers. Curtain.
–
