Finding passion and sensuousness in Tolstoy and Rodin
Anna Karenina and Rodin — two ballet works by a contemporary Russian dance company — are part of the NCPA Dance Festival. Chen Nan reports
Eifman Ballet, the contemporary Russian dance company from St. Petersburg, will stage two shows, Anna Karenina and Rodin, at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing from Sept 13 to 16.
The two ballets are part of the upcoming NCPA Dance Festival, an annual event initiated by the NCPA in 2012.
In 2006 the company made its debut on the Chinese mainland,
staging Tchaikovsky: The Mystery of Life and Death and Russian Hamlet: The son of Catherine the Great, which impressed audiences with its performances in which avant-garde dance is combined with contemporary methods from dramatic theater and film.
“My theater is a theater of open emotional experience,” says Boris Eifman, the company founder and artistic director, who is acclaimed as a philosopher in choreography. “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.”
Anna Karenina, based on the work by Leo Tolstoy, premiered in 2005 and is filled with inner psychological energy. Eifman focuses on Anna Karenina’s love triangle.
Two years ago Eifman brought this ballet work to the NCPA Dance Festival.
Eifman says it is the passion, “the basic instinct”, that causes social norms to be violated, destroys mother love and breaks Anna Karenina’s connection with her own soul.
The ballet is about the present rather than the past, he says.
“Ballet is a special field of realization of the psychological dramas, the possibility to penetrate into the subconsciousness,” says Eifman, who was born in Siberia, and who graduated from the department of choreography of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) Conservatory. “Every new ballet is a search into the unknown.”
He founded the Eifman Ballet in 1977, and it achieved international fame for its original and innovative concept of ballet works.
Anna Karenina has always fascinally nated him, he says.
“While reading Tolstoy one feels how the author fully understands the psychological world of his heroes, and incredibly keenly and precisely describes life in Russia. For me Anna was a werewolf, because two people lived inside her. Exter- there was the woman everyone knew; the other woman was someone immersed in the world of passion.”
Eifman’s other choreographic work, Rodin, which premiered in 2011, is dedicated to the life and creative work of the great sculptor Auguste Rodin and his apprentice, lover and muse Camille Claudel.
To the music by Maurice Ravel, Camille Saint-Saens and Jules Massenet, the ballet follows the story of Rodin and Claudel’s passionate relationship. Their breakup dealt a death blow to Claudel’s mental health and marked the beginning of her destruction.
With the help of the body language of modern ballet, Eifman presents a new concept of the world of human passion studied masterfully by Rodin and Claudel in their works.
In Eifman’s words, the life and love of Rodin and Claudel is an amazing story of two artists in an incredibly dramatic alliance in which everything was interlaced: passion, hatred and artistic jealousy.
The spiritual and energetic interchange of the two sculptors is a special phenomenon: living together with Rodin, Camille was not only inspiring him, helping him find a new style and creating masterpieces, but also going through the impetuous development of her own
Ballet is a special field of realization of the psychological dramas, the possibility to penetrate into the subconsciousness.” Boris Eifman, Eifman Ballet company founder and artistic director
talent. In fact she was being transformed into a great master.
“With the help of body language, we talk in our performance about passion, internal struggle, despair — about all of those life phenomena of the human spirit, which were brilliantly expressed by Rodin and Camille in bronze and marble,” Eifman says.
“To turn a moment frozen in stone into an irrepressible sensuous stream of body movements is what I was striving for when creating this new ballet performance.”