Review of the festival by Roger Smith

Материал из HEPTACHOR.

Terpsichore in Tauris

The wind has died away and the sea waves no long march in with high and white curling crests. But water still pours onto the rocks taking the force of the sea, and then runs back in cascades and falls. The rocks are still amidst endless movement. Out to sea, there is a lake of emerald green water, shimmering. Beyond this, there is dark blue water, darkly reflecting the grey and black clouds climbing up above the horizon, shot through with silver light.

Here the Greek ships landed. Heracles, leaving his name, Odysseus (some say), Orestes – in search of Iphigeneia, priestess in the land of the Taurians – and then, later, the merchants, the orators, the household women, the slaves, who built the city of Chersonesos on this promontory, with an open sea to one side and a calmer bay to the other. They walled and paved the city and it flourished for fifteen-hundred years.

Inland from the sea, cut in an arc in the side of the hill, is the semi-circle of stone rows of seats of the theatre. The original seats, perhaps first laid out in the Fourth Century before our era, have gone in constant rebuilding, but the reconstruction uses the old stones and follows the same lines. Before and below the seats is the stage, backed by the foundation walls of the proscenium. To the left of the arc, looking out from where an audience sits on the stones, are the broken walls of an early Christian chapel, and behind this, further ruined walls stick up, their line copied in the line of the tops of trees, grey-green, beyond. Each layer of relief is like the carved backdrop of a frieze; they darken as the sun sets and the light goes. This is the only Ancient Greek theatre north of the Black Sea. Here men watched tragedy, and later women also came, though to watch comedy. Now, after twenty-five centuries, there is a silent and rapt audience for the young women who are dancing – perhaps some are girls and some are older – but the dance is the dance of young women.

‘Each day is lost on which one does not dance’, so sayeth a wise man.

The audience is from modern cities, holiday visitors from Smolensk, local people from Sevastopol’, the administrators of cultural events, those who work for the museum site and its preservation. There are perhaps two-hundred silent people of all ages. They are not the rich, but they are the curious for life. Silent, not knowing what they expected, but knowing in this living moment that there share in the beauty which the Greeks knew, a spark which has come down through the glory and hell of the centuries and which dance, here, once again breathes into a flame. The dancers are in tunics – the chiton – light, flowing with the body, as we see Greek women wearing painted on the vases. They were different coloured tunics to bring different colour to different music. The Furies, when they appear to revenge blood, are in black. All dance barefoot, supported by the simple ground. The women would wish to dance to living music, always classical, but here they must move to the recordings of the piano of Bach or Chopin, the eighteenth-century orchestra of Gluck and the trumpets of Verdi. They are not, speaking precisely, ‘dancing’ but performing ‘musical movement’, seeking expression for music through the dancing body, giving the spirit of the inner life of beauty outward form. The connection of body and soul is the breath. Such dance, in its modern variations, comes from Isadora Duncan and other women who, at the end of the nineteenth century, freed themselves from the rules of ballet, freed themselves from restricting clothes and sought what for them was a more natural and direct joy in movement. In the pictures and reliefs of the Ancient Greeks, and in the imagination with which they pictured the warmth, laughter and light of an early and still unspoilt culture, the Arcadia of our minds, they found inspiration. Now their grand-daughters and great grand-daughters, metaphorically speaking, have returned to dance in the kind of place from which, in spiritual terms, it originally came.

The performance begins in the light of day and ends in the nearly dark early evening. Birds settle noisily for the night in the trees. Shadows from the theatre lights spread over the ruins. The flow of movement of soft limbs is a sharp contrast to hard edges of stones. To dance with bare feet, the women have had need to lay a carpet; it intrudes, but, still, what matters at the last is their movement. There are three ‘groups’ from Moscow and one guest dancer, each distinctive in its or her own way: the largest group, the Studio of Musical Movement, named after S. D. Rudneva, known as Heptachor; the similar Studio of Musical Movement, ‘Isadora’, at the Moscow State Friendship University; and the Studio of Artistic Movement of the Central House of Scientists of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, which follows the principles of aesthetic gymnastics developed by Ludmilla Alekseeva – more formalised exercises, first laid out in the 1920s.

The lone dancer, from Austin, Texas, has worked with the Isadora Duncan School in New York; but now, in this theatre, Meg Brooker dances her own version of Lizst’s ‘Second Transcendental Étude’. It is a passage of great Romantic beauty, the longing, risk and ecstasy which might be ours should we choose to live by the heart. Heptachor, the name chosen by seven young women who, in 1913, seeing Isadora Duncan dance in St Petersburg, set out to live a life in which they, in their new way, would breathe and dance freely to music, frames the beginning and conclusion of the evening, with scenes from the opening and ending of Gluck’s ‘Orpheo ed Euridice’, with its pure and lovely music set, too, in the world of the Ancient Greek imagination. This group includes the one man, who appears from among the stones, passes in front of the still line of women, the shades of the underworld, and disappears again among the stones. This is an evening of much desire that beauty might surpass the terror of the world. The graceful, sometimes strong, movement of women gives this ideal its voice. Towards the end of the performance, Heptachor dances to the march from Aida, a tribute to their teacher and to the designer of the evening, Aida Ailamaz’yan. It is a splendid movement in formation, gentle Amazons in red chitons, strong, confident and lovely. The group, taught by Valentina Ryasanova, from the Friendship University are the youngest, and they move with tender and touching closeness in contrasting pieces of music for the piano. Maidens may make Poseidon rise from the sea! The Alekseeva group, whose teacher Inessa Kulagina herself dances one small piece, a flexing movement of arms and hands, have preserved a series of studies from the early, creative Soviet years. They hold and move the body with precision, sometimes with a bending, organic flow, sometimes with the sharp movements of a bodily-machine. Two women, with the round knitted helmets and body-following dresses of the 1920s, shadow each other in an elegant study. All gather together in a joyful line, lit with the united fun of girls and the wisdom of women, and our one man, for the final, grateful applause.

This is not professional art, paid for by commercial sponsors and the result of years of full-time training. The dancers do not have fixed smiles, they do not perform prodigious feats and they do not move in indivisible unison. But if there was an audience expectation of lack of preparation or amateurism, it was wrong. The sequences smoothly follow each other. The dancers give a sense of knowing that they are at this particular place and this particular time; they want to share with the audience; they have no pretence. Above all, they are alive to each other, want to dance with each other, show a special, joyful awareness that there can be shared beauty among people and that this beauty is now. But it comes to an end with the night.

There is blessed good fortune: it does not rain. The great clouds building up over the sea pass by; though they hide the sun as it sets, they disperse in charcoal and purple as the first star appears. The previous night it had rained, and in the morning the stage was a sad sight of pools and mud. There was rumour of ritual conducted at the theatre to hold off rain; the local organiser and fabulous panjandrum of problems, and dancer in Heptachor, Ol’ga Ushakova, promised that if the Fates had a phone number, she would phone them too; there was talk of sacrificing a virgin – and there are a number, surely pleasing to the gods, to choose from. Finally, whatever the cause, the earth dries and skies hold back. This day is the culmination of a festival, the Festival of Musical Movement and Plastic Dance, ‘Terpsichore in Tauris’, begun a week before under the name of the Muse in the hot and brilliant sunshine of the Crimea. This is the land in the sun about which Russians dream. The festival is an experiment, light-hearted in manner but committed in intent, to unite the Moscow and St Petersburg traditions of musical movement with the ancient world from which their form of dance, we imagine, originally comes. There has been almost no money. But the museum at Chersonesos has loaned the site in imaginative generosity; the Sevastopol’ Russian Dance Theatre has loaned the lighting and the municipal office of culture the sound; the adjacent Gallery for Contemporary Art, ‘Green Pyramid’, has made space for a lecture under overhanging vines, a loving portrait by Irina Sirotkina, from Heptachor, on ‘The forgotten dance of the Silver Age’; and out on the characteristically ugly edge of a once-Soviet town, the Club ‘Impulse’ has been made available for master-classes – in the arts of the three groups, in Feldenkrais exercises for bodily self-knowledge, in Duncan dance and in yoga. This club is a sad and dirty hall, and a pass, a signed and stamped piece of pathetic paper is even needed to use the toilet. But there is space, and the young women scrub the floor and then the classes, and laughter, bring life. Local radio and television turn up. It is a week of sharing, of creating something out of almost nothing, of bathing and eating on the rocky beach as the sun goes down and the dark waters are burnished with gold, of fresh figs and of local wine, and of finally pulling a performance out of the magician’s hat. The dancers have paid for themselves, helped pay for cameramen for a video and for still pictures, to register the beauty sought. Rain and wind overtake the hot sun during the week, but the sea plays out a continuous, if changing, rhythm along the shore.

After the performance, only warm and generous toasts remain to he made, and the slow train journey back to Moscow – or the long flight back to Austin – must be taken. There is at once talk of return, a new festival, since there is so much joy in this one and so well fitted are the theatre and the dance, the ancient and the young. The dancers will have to deal with the two outstanding, and all too familiar, problems: how to achieve publicity, to open up the classes, the sharing, to local people – musical movement has the deep strength that each person, however awkward they may feel, can move on really listening to music with a reflection of inner strength; and how to find money – would that some god would shower down his gold! Yet they danced in this week, and no past and no future is needed, finally, for that to be precious, though dancing in the past there was and dancing in the future there will be. Each wave breaking on the rocks lives in its moment and flows back into the sea.

A Romantic appreciation written by Roger Smith, for the Festival of Musical Movement and Plastic Dance, Terpsichore in Tauris, 4-9 September 2007, held at Sevastopol’ and Chersonesos in the Crimea, the Ukraine.