Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings

Russia Makes Room for Contemporary Dance

| 217 Russia Makes Room for Contemporary Dance: Cross-Cultural Festival in Yaroslavl Breaks the Ballet Barrier Feature, Dance Magazine, February 2003 As I mentioned in my review of Sasha Pepelyaev (“The New Russia” in “The Nineties”), I was interested in the new dance scene in Russia. I heard about Lisa First, the mover and shaker from Minneapolis who organized exchanges with Russia, and got myself invited to her festival. There I saw that Pepelyaev was the tip of the iceberg. Modern and postmodern dance had taken root all over Russia. This was exciting not only because modern dance in Russia had been denied for so long, but also because it meant that the land of supreme ballet was opening up to Western influences—and to the challenge of artistic originality. Cabbage soup, quaint streetcars, and magnificent, green-domed basilicas might be what most Americans would remember about Yaroslavl, an ancient city northeast of Moscow. But those of us who participated in the Fifth International Festival of Movement and Dance on the Volga last August were struck by the rich diversity of contemporary dance drawn from Russia and Eastern Europe. Americans from Minnesota, California, Tennessee, and New York performed, led workshops, and engaged in cross-cultural collaborations . Although the tram ride was not guaranteed to deliver us from the hotel to the theater any faster than walking, the three-ruble (ten-cent) ride over corroding pavement reminded us that we were in an entirely different time and place. But the dancing put us all on common ground. Modern dance, jazz dance, and Contact Improvisation abounded. Companies from Russia, the United States, the Czech Republic, and Poland gave performances and workshops. The Russian students—about two hundred—plunged into sessions led by Americans in jazz, hip-hop, and modern. A band of at least ten translators facilitated the flow of communication. Participants and audiences filled the 750-seat theater and a smaller one for seven evenings. Lisa First, the American organizer, came to Russia and fell in love with it in 1989. A dancer and practitioner of Alexander Technique, she had read an article in Dance Magazine about the American Dance Festival’s program in Moscow. By then, she says, she had met soul mates in Yaroslavl and started to plan for an exchange: “We already had the idea for a festival. It happened simultaneously. The doors were opening.” Her partners in Yaroslavl have 218 | Through the Eyes of a Dancer been Alexander Girshon, a dancer and improviser influenced by experimental theater, and Nadia Pushanetsky, a folk dancer turned economist. They inaugurated the festival in 1993 and continued to hold it every two years. Last summer, it was overflowing with twenty-one companies and fifty workshops . The Provincial Dances Theatre from Yekaterinburg led off the festival with Maple Garden, a surreal evocation of romantic relationships by artistic director Tatiana Baganova. Six dancers gave masterful performances, supporting strange or striking images: A man wiggled toward a woman’s face and, with his mouth, pulled a long string out of her mouth. Another woman approached with a pair of scissors and snipped the thread that bound them. A bare-branched tree, artificial fog, and eccentric costumes helped create a bleak, mysterious landscape. In contrast, a group of spunky girls from Siberia called Second Parallel Dance Workshop skipped and jumped and played pranks on each other in Six Milk Drops. For example, one girl sat on a chair; another sneaked up behind her and grabbed the chair, leaving the first girl sitting strong in midair —a possible metaphor for self-reliance. Local dance star Anton Kosov, a gamin-like creature of astounding versatility , contributed a solo that strung together jazz, ballet, and break dancing. Slinky dancing came from the three men of Contemporary Dance Theatre , from Chelyabinsk, in Olga Pona’s Expectation. Loose-limbed in black suits, they slithered and sliced in choreography that looked like a cross between Stephen Petronio and Bob Fosse. Far, Far Away, by PO.v.s. tanZe from Moscow, combined the brainy energy of current European dancemakers like Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker with the grounded martial arts of capoeira. The piece sparkled with witty and inventive choreography. From St. Petersburg came Kannon Dance Company with Songs of Komitas , choreographed by artistic director Natalia Kasparova, a powerhouse of a dancer. (Komitas Vardapet was an Armenian composer who went crazy after witnessing the Armenian massacre in 1915.) The cast moved through ingenious partnering with exceptional fluidity. Saira Blanche Theatre, the Moscow-based...