Memories of the future. Dance of life to the music of the symphony-requiem Forgotten land Jiri Kilian

The repertoire of the Bolshoi Theater includes the second opus of the world-famous Dutch choreographer of Czech origin Jiri Kilian - a ballet that belongs rather to the early period of his work, but, like a good book, has its own fate, tested by time and stage space in many countries. It is symbolic that we remember the Forgotten Land in 2017, when the entire ballet world creatively and retrospectively celebrated the maestro's 70th birthday.

Kilian became famous not only for his compositions, but also for the fact that with their help he raised a magnificent troupe, making the Netherlands Dance Theater (NDT) one of the most successful ballet companies. He himself, both as a dancer and as a choreographer, began at the Stuttgart Ballet (the “Stuttgart Miracle”, as critics define it) by John Cranko. In 1981 - he had already directed the NDT for several years, and almost ten years had passed since the death of Cranko - Kilian responded to the request of Marcia Heide to direct a ballet for the Stuttgart troupe. (Heide was Cranko's constant muse, and after his death she headed the Stuttgart Ballet).

Jiri Kilian's website says that this is the so-called musical choreography: "The Forgotten Land" came out entirely from music. (Like any Kilian ballet, however, any one is the flesh of the flesh of music).

This music, meanwhile, has an interesting history. Britten "hit" among those composers who in 1939 received an order from the Japanese government to write an essay for the celebration of the 2600th anniversary of the ruling imperial dynasty. Grandiose celebrations on this occasion took place in 1940, but Britten did not sound at them. The Japanese authorities were embarrassed by the form of the composition - the Symphony-Requiem, the titles of the three parts of which correspond to those accepted in Christian worship and the general gloomy character corresponds to the declared genre.

In addition to the fact that the composer did not at all intend to hide his belonging to the Christian world, there were other circumstances that prevented him from writing something "odic" and major. The contract was late, the customers did not make themselves felt for too long. And Britten began work on his Symphony (as it is believed, in memory of the deceased parents). When the contract was nevertheless received, there was too little time left to start and complete new work. As it often happens, the random "wrong" orientation of the completed order, being considered in the context of the era, begins to be perceived as inevitable, as if dictated from above. A staunch pacifist, Britten reflected in his essay a premonition of an impending catastrophe - a world war, foreseeing the approach of which, he himself changed his place of residence, moving from England to the United States. Japan had yet to join Hitler's tripartite alliance, but the war with China was already in full swing...

But "The Forgotten Land" by Jiri Kilian has no political background, more precisely, it absorbs everything and everything in a person's relationship with other people, with himself, with the outside world. As he himself says, all his life he "conversates" about love and death. About human relationships, about their elusive beauty and sadness. Although this ballet, as from childhood, comes from music, however, it also had another starting point: the choreographer received an important creative impulse from Edvard Munch's canvas, from his Dance of Life.

The “Dance of Life” leads to the edge of the earth descending into the sea: several couples are involved in a whirlpool of endless movement, men and women, clinging to each other among the oscillating waves that roll over them by the inexorable will of life, do not unclench their almost saving convulsive embrace. In the center, close-up, there is a “red” couple (a woman is dressed in a red dress), the movement of these two has not yet become impetuous, but the poses and exchange of glances are filled with growing passion - another moment, and the whirlwind will whirl them, and draw them to the sea, and will not let them linger on the edge of the land. On the left - a woman in white, "without a pair", but, it seems, without bad premonitions, reaches for a flower and has no idea what it's like, blazing with fire, to sway on the waves of a raging sea. On the right is the mournful figure of a woman in black, for whom the fire has already gone out and the most irresistible and dark waves are approaching closer and closer.

Finally and irrevocably sacrificing the realistic style of painting to Expressionism, Munch formulated his credo as follows: “Never again will I paint interiors, reading people and knitting women. I will paint people who live, breathe and feel, suffer and love.” A complete match with Mr. Kilian, whose symbolist choreography also seeks to convey the frequency of human breathing, regulated by love (i.e. life) under the watchful gaze of unsleeping death.

The ballet "The Forgotten Land", in which three main and three "supporting" couples act, explores a wide emotional spectrum of human relationships and goes beyond the thematic framework of "love and the life of a woman." That's why he was given such a name: as love and death are always together, so are the earth and the sea, the soil under their feet and the abyss next to it. The earth as a symbol of hope, a real or imaginary support, an unattainable, “promised” land, whether it came from the real past or from the realm of dreams and dreams. And which everyone will have to leave sooner or later.

Kilian not only “reads” the pictures or listens to the music. The very life of the creator, whose creation inspired him, also becomes a source of inspiration: “Benjamin Britten was born in East Anglia. For part of the English territory there is always a threat from the sea. And this eternal presence of the ocean as a force that gives or takes life is the main idea of ​​my ballet.” (Describing the second movement of his symphony, Dies irae, Day of Wrath, Britten also described it as a dance - "the dance of death").

And even the circumstances of the life of the choreographer himself, to some extent, can be considered involved in the creative process. Kilian, a mature master, returns to Stuttgart, where his formation began, in order to create for this troupe - as a wonderful memory, as a tribute - a happy, uncertain, unforgettable, eternal "Forgotten Land" ...

The premiere series of screenings will take place on November 2, 3, 4 and 5 ( performers ). The ballet will run on the same evening as the one-act ballets Etudes and The Cage.
(Kilian's first ballet, performed by the Bolshoi ballet troupe, Symphony of Psalms, is still in the theatre's repertoire, on the Historical Stage).

Spectacular couple in black - Ekaterina Shipulina and Vyacheslav Lantratov. Photo by Damir Yusupov from the official website of the Bolshoi Theater

Jiri Kilian directed The Forgotten Land to music by Benjamin Britten. The English composer wrote the Sinfonia da Requiem commissioned by the Japanese government for the 2600th anniversary of the founding of the Japanese state in 1940. Offended by the fact that it was based on the Latin text of the Catholic liturgy, the militaristic government did not accept the work, and Britten dedicated the work to the memory of his parents. Kilian composed the choreography for this music at the request of Marcia Heide, former prima and then artistic director of the Stuttgart Ballet. The world premiere of the ballet took place on April 4, 1981. The Forgotten Land was carried to the stage of the Bolshoi Theater by Kilian's assistants Stefan Zeromsky and Lorrain Bloin. Together with last season's premieres "The Cage" by Jerome Robbins and "Etudes" by Harald Lander, she is now compiling the program of the evening of one-act ballets.

It does not hurt, of course, to remember that Britten, who was born on the foggy shores of the cold ocean, wrote Sinfonia da Requiem when the world was shaken by a terrible war. It is useful to read that Kilian (head of the Netherlands Dance Theater in the 1980s) was inspired by the ocean as a force that takes and gives life, as well as Edvard Munch's painting The Dance of Life. But to be honest, you don't need to know all this. So the stage result is thematically wider, emotionally richer and in every respect deeper than any explanations and programs.

Six dancing couples in costumes of different colors on a black-brown-gray background. Like a flock of seagulls. Although there is no imitation in paints or plastic. "The choreography here," says Kilian, "flows directly from the music." The music and choreography really make up a single whole, together with the set design and even with the dynamics of specifically tailored long skirts (set designer and costume designer John Macfarlane) creating a kind of “augmented reality”, opening a window to the harsh Northern Europe, to the gloomy Varangian waters, where character and aesthetic feeling are squeezed out. And the viewer involved, it seems, even the sense of touch and smell. You almost really feel prickly, but strengthening air and smells of healthy cold, iodine, purity. And also - an internal, some kind of "soil" force. Far from being only physical.

Music written almost 80 years ago and choreography composed almost 40 years ago are perceived as topical. On the one hand, consonant with today's spiritual confusion. On the other hand, they do not allow to drown in this turmoil.

Unlike some of his eminent colleagues, Jiri Kilian does not veto the performance of his ballets around the world. He is one of those whose creations are shown to dance troupes not just for reasons of guild respectability, but also as a way to discover new spiritual, sensual, intellectual, and with that expressive possibilities. To liberation from blinders. To liberation. Ultimately - to the expansion of the worldview.

Of course, if there are "responsive" performers in the troupe.

Found at the Bolshoi Theatre. First of all, these are the three leading couples. Ekaterina Shipulina - Vladislav Lantratov (couple in black), Olga Smirnova - Semyon Chudin (couple in white), Yanina Parienko - Vyacheslav Lopatin (couple in red) with a certain amount of pathos, but without sinning against taste, told the viewer, or rather, talked with him about love and beauty, about tragedy and overcoming, about passion and lack of freedom, about a defenseless and omnipotent person, about the private and universal - according to spoke a language for which there are no boundaries in this kind of "talk".

The Russian premiere of Jiri Kilian's one-act ballet to the music of Britten's The Forgotten Land took place on the New Stage of the Bolshoi Theatre. Tells Tatyana Kuznetsova.

The Forgotten Land, staged by Jiri Kilian in 1981 for the Stuttgart Ballet, replaced Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, also Kilian's production born in 1978, in the program of diverse one-act ballets. Mahar Vaziev, artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, did not rule out the appearance of a third modern classic ballet in time to make up Jiri Kilian's three-movement evening. The idea is wonderful, but not fresh, even within the framework of a single Moscow: Kilian's one-act ballets recently graced the billboard of the Stanislavsky Museum Theatre. Those were contrasting performances, from different periods of the choreographer's work. In the Bolshoi, they prefer the early Kilian - restless, pretentious and more classical.

Kilian himself admitted that, looking at his "fossils", he feels "like in purgatory", doomed to endlessly stay among old works. However, they do not bother the public: beautiful and harmonious, even when they depict discord and chaos, moderately sensual, moderately sensitive, seemingly plotless, but understandable (there are plenty of readable metaphors), these ballets caress the eye and elevate the soul.

The Forgotten Land, set to the music of the Requiem Symphony, is also uplifting. The one that Benjamin Britten wrote in 1940, commissioned by the Japanese, for the 2600th anniversary of the empire, and which, unexpectedly for the customers, he composed in the form of a Catholic funeral mass, after which the order was predictably canceled. Jiri Kilian chose this music when he was invited to a production at the Stuttgart Ballet: after the death of their leader John Cranko, the company searched for years for an equivalent repertoire. It should be added that the late choreographer played a major role in the fate of Kilian: it was he who in 1968 invited a talented Czech to work in Stuttgart - he left his native Prague in the midst of the suppression of the Prague Spring, forever hating the USSR and its tanks. So Kilian's choice of the requiem and the name of the ballet is more than logical.

Kilian himself, however, mentions other sources of inspiration: the harsh sea on the shores of which Britten grew up, and Edvard Munch's painting "The Dance of Life", depicting three women of different ages and life experiences. Following the choreographer, artist John MacFarlane depicted a lead ocean on the backdrop, ending at the stage with purely material iron pipes of waves, and dressed the three main soloists and their accompanying partners in Munch's colors: black, red and creamy white. There are three more "transitional" couples in the ballet - gray, pinkish and beige, playing the role of some plastic halftones. The second parties are built on softened variants of combinations of the main pairs or synchronously duplicate their movements. In Stuttgart, the premiere was danced by the leading soloists and the premieres of the troupe. At the Bolshoi, Kilian's assistants Stefan Zeromsky and Lorren Bloin also chose the best, most adapted to the study of "foreign" plastic languages ​​for the first cast: Olga Smirnova and Semyon Chudina (pair in white), Ekaterina Shipulina and Vladislav Lantratova (pair in black), Yanina Parienko and Vyacheslav Lopatin (pair in red).

Everyone danced well: inspired, emotional, beautiful along the lines, wide in amplitude, exactly according to the pattern. However, it was a "Russian translation". The famous Kilian cantilena - a non-stop stream of impulsive movements - was transformed by Russian soloists in the classical style: with bright accents of poses in the adagio, spectacular fixation of the upper supports and involuntary emphasizing of technical virtuosities. The horizontal of the "oceanic" waves of the original choreography turned into a vertical of contrasting surges and falls; exhalation-contraction brought by Kilian from modern dance turned into a deliberate rounding of the back. And although Lorrain Bloine, who worked with artists, is a world-renowned specialist in removing bodily clamps, she can’t even break the steel corset of the muscles of classical soloists, who do not stop dancing the academic repertoire, in a month and a half. And is it necessary? All the same, for Russia, any Kilian is not forgotten, but still a newly discovered land.

"Forgotten Land", according to the choreographer, "completely and completely came out of music." The three parts of Benjamin Britten's "Symphony-Requiem" ("Slow, mournful procession", "Dance of death" and "Decisive conclusion") give rise to mental anguish, desperate anger and great grief of loss.

Kilian, like no one else, knows how to reveal music through dance, capturing the heard musical thoughts and feelings in plastic.

But it turned out that the music of Britten's requiem is consonant with the emotional mood of the paintings of the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch, in particular, his painting "The Dance of Life", which, in fact, inspired Kilian to create the poetic ballet "The Forgotten Land".

The sensual architectonics of "Earth", like everything talented, is extremely simple: six pairs of dancers "master" the space filled with sounds in gloomy gray scenery. First, as a “flock of birds”, all together, and then breaking up into separate pairs: three main pairs and three pairs, becoming either their shadows, or their alter ego.

The bizarre movements of the dancers' bodies captivate with the graphics of plastic lines - either geometrically precise, like blades of swords piercing space, or deliberately "broken", like flashes of ritual bonfires.

Special mention should be made of the "talking hands" of the performers. They pray, then they are indignant, then they soar to the sky with the wings of birds, then they hang along the body with whips.

The dance of the temperamental, stylish Ekaterina Shipulina and the virtuoso Vladislav Lantratov is a hymn to human passions. Only "classical" ballet dancers, with sculptural but flexible bodies and brilliant technique, can achieve such a figurative artistic effect. Together with Yanina Parienko and Vyacheslav Lopatin, impeccable in the “classics”, with the refined Olga Smirnova and the elegant Semyon Chudin, as well as with three other couples, they created an inimitable spectacle of “living canvases”.

Couple in red: Yanina Parienko, Vyacheslav Lopatin

It is as if you are looking at the inspired work of an expressionist artist, before your eyes turning a gray canvas with bodies-“smears” into a plotless, but such an exciting game of poses, lines, various movements, inventive supports and sensual figures.

Unforgettable adagio by Olga Smirnova and Semyon Chudin. Their dance-declaration of love is attack and retreat, victory and defeat, pain and suffering, freedom and slavery, peace and anxiety... Such is Jiri Kilian's exquisite choreography, which turns the natural sexuality of human duets into the erotica of the high art of ballet duets.

The ending of the performance was wonderfully done. The three dancers left on the stage, like three birds with broken wings, are ready to accept the challenge of fate. At the same time, Kilian gives the audience the opportunity to experience the sensual moments of aesthetic catharsis themselves.

Couple in white: Olga Smirnova, Semyon Chudin

The “meeting” of three famous artists (Britten, Munch and Kilian) on the Moscow stage made it possible not only to get purely spectator pleasure, admiring the grace and ingenuity of the choreographer, the virtuoso technique of the performers, but also to appreciate the scale of the plastic decisions of the philosopher and poet Kilian, who puts at the forefront the spirituality of a person who strives, despite all the difficulties of his life path, “to love and light”.

The premiere screenings of The Forgotten Land took place as part of the One-Act Ballet Evenings, framed by two other performances: Cells by Jerome Robbins and Etudes by Harald Lander, which Vechernyaya Moskva wrote about in its time.

In The Cell, which first saw the light of day in the 1950s, on the eve of the coming sexual revolutions, Robbins guessed not only the side effects of these revolutions, but also the origins of human self-destruction as a price for pleasure. Now, in an age of gender fever, Robbins' story of the life of spiders looks not only hard-hearted, but also, as they say, on the topic of the day.

Three in the final of the performance (from left to right): Olga Smirnova, Ekaterina Shipulina, Yanina Parienko

The ballet "Etudes" is a kind of anthem by the Dane Harald Lander to the ballet class, in which the virtuoso technique of performing skills is practiced. The artists of the Bolshoi Theater adequately presented the "Etudes", captivating the audience not only with their good training, but also with their inherent emotional energy, verifying the algebra of movements with the harmony of the soul.