Terpsichore in Tauris-2008
Материал из HEPTACHOR.
PLIASKA* IN TAURIS
An appreciation for the 2nd Festival of Musical Movement and Plastic Dance, ‘Terpsichore in Tauris, II’, 3-8 September 2008, held at Chersonesos Taurica in the Crimea, the Ukraine
by Roger Smith
- Pliaska in Russian means a dance free from constraints, exuberant and ecstatic.
The sun burns yet at the end of the day, but the bare and hard blue of the sky is turning to the colours of a soft peach. The air becomes visible, the air above the white stones of ancient Chersonesos is touched with orange. The cries of bathers sound far away, boats out at sea appear not to move, people slow their walking on dusty paths. There is the dry smell of sage. It is the southern summer evening of northern dreams. Already, and soon to set, there is a faint half-moon following the sun in the western sky. To the east, seen from the seats in the amphitheatre which holds the warmth of the day into the coming dusk, there is haze over Sevastopol’.
Two early September evenings are thus, two evenings of movement and song in the restored Greek amphitheatre of Chersonesos. There are two concerts – the heart of the second festival of musical movement and plastic dance, Terpsichore in Tauris. They re-affirm the power of the muses of dance and music; they braid together the centuries; they express the ever new longing to find beauty in a world too often brutal, cold and at war. The concerts, set in the framework of the festival, draw into one whole four studios from Moscow: the Studio of Musical Movement, Isadora, at the State Friendship University, led by Valentina Ryasanova; the Studio of Artistic Movement of the Central House of Scientists of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which follows the principles of aesthetic gymnastics developed by Ludmilla Alekseeva, led by Inessa Kulagina; the largest group, the Studio of Musical Movement, named after S. D. Rudneva, known as Heptachor, led by Aida Ailamaz’yan; and, working with Heptachor, and thus bringing to the festival song as well as movement, the vocal studio of Maria Ganeshina. It is a remarkable cooperation, a generous sharing of the spirit of plastic movement, which began with the work of Isadora Duncan and other women, at the close of the nineteenth century in Russia’s Silver Age, in reaction against the formal movements of ballet. There was then, and there is again in this festival, the hope of pliaska – the divine frivolity of the dancer, in Nietzsche’s words.
During the hot preceding days there have been master-classes and rehearsals, the classes on the clover lawn set in the yard of the gallery of contemporary art, Green Pyramid, right by the gates to Khersones. The Moscow studios and local participants practise exercises with each other, seek the freedom of plastic movement; women of different generations share laughter and pass on of traditions begun over a century ago. The building of Green Pyramid itself echoes Greek architecture, with a colonnade giving shelter from the sun for the pianist and for on-lookers. The dancers themselves move in the sun, in a glorious pell-mell of colour and variety of dress and head coverings – a sky-blue turban, a floppy linen hat, a knitted white cap, a salmon-pink kerchief. The variety is a reminder that, yes, there is discipline, but it is the discipline of each person finding in herself a joy and a pride in letting the body speak as it wants to speak, bringing wholeness to a person’s expression.
There is of course also rehearsal, a little harsh by day in the hot amphitheatre. Visitors to the ruined foundations and stony beaches of Chersonesos provide a camera-clicking, beer-drinking, puzzled but entertained, continuously changing audience. An old carpet has been loaned and laid on the dusty ground swept of stones, as this dancing, most emphatically, is barefooted. The early twentieth-century forms of plastic movement, which led to contemporary dance, were of course an attempt to find an anti-ballet, a natural rather than artificial vocabulary for the moving body. It is no wonder that women, finding freely moving clothes and freedom of expression, took a lead. The idea of musical movement specifically came out of belief that the inner ear can find forms of movement in music – and hence the aims and activity of this festival turn once again around the intimate links between breathing, the singing voice and dance. In all this, it is especially easy to imagine in this ancient setting, the Greeks showed the way. There is harmony in brining back to life the Greek amphitheatre the pitched voice breathing with the pitched step.
Two concerts. Both begin with the golden sun laying its last rays on the top rows of the semicircle of stone seats and lighting-up the broken walls of the early Christian church breaking one side of the theatre. The audience, which is free to come and go, has a core, crowded to the centre and at the front, of people who know that they want to see and hear; and it has a periphery composed of visitors who do not know what they want or what to expect, and from this part some move off to smoke or to drink, but others, perhaps to their surprise, settle down in delight at the beauty which unfolds before them.
Beauty there is, in gentle waves, as on the sea now glittering with the light of the low sun. It is an austere beauty at the beginnings of both concerts, music of the baroque age with piano accompaniment, Handel, Purcell, Gluck, in the first concert with formal staging by Heptachor, and in the second with equally stylised singing by Anastasia Fokina and Valentina Fokina, remarkable sisters. On both occasions, positioning one singer on the ruined walls sets up a spatial separation of voices, enabling one voice literally to float over the others. There is a sober, even angelic dignity. The voices, strong and firm, of a quality rarely heard in the open air, carry far and clear in this amphitheatre. In the first concert, the sombre beauty continues in a performance by the Alekseeva studio of an extract from Gluck’s Orpheo e Euridice, in which the group of women, in flowing white cloaks, convey the dignity of the underworld painful to human eyes. In both concerts, Heptachor performs the six études (Op. 740) of Cherni, a core part of the tradition of musical movement. The mood and movement of the performances then lightens, moving from the baroque to the romantic and the modern. On the first evening the moment of change comes when the Alekseeva group, four to the left side and three to the right, line up before the audience in profile, like two Hellenic freezes, and then the performers move with the exquisite precision, to the modernist music of a Prokofiev étude (Op. 2, no. 4). It is a delight of playful formality, a delight repeated the next evening in a different way, in the Egyptian fresco, music by K. Heller, with a single dancer, Tanya Nedachina, in brilliant orange gym suit, framed by still, posed dancers in profile, performing small, subtle precise movements, placing a moving fresco before the eye. In the second concert, the light spirit runs onto the stage immediately after the baroque arias, with the group Isadora. Youth, joy in dancing and loveliness coming together in music and movement and flow like fresh water. These young women want to dance, and the form in which they do it is ideally suited – ends and means match. Such dance concludes, as it surely must, with a Strauss waltz, far more attractive in this bare-footed form than at any Viennese ball.
By the middle of the concerts, the audience is giving all its attention, full of delight and wonder. In the second concert, the attending eyes follow in silent, wrapt anticipation, though of quite what they do not know, as a boy, in red Greek chiton, moves lithely over the ruined walls lighting kerosene flames. The sun has set and dusk has come. ‘Heptachor’ assemble for the second part of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Two lines, each with four women in coloured chitons, crouch rigid in profile to the audience, threatening, sphinx-like, and two more women, in black chitons, at the front slowly rise and sink with the first almost silent rhythms of the music. We are before sunrise in the pagan world of our minds. It is a bold branching out for the group from the flowing, organic and romantic aesthetics of their work, a response which began in their own response, gradually refined into movements for performance, to the power of one of the greatest pieces of twentieth-century music. To the ear and eye which has not become deadened by cynicism, this dance is still a shock. In rehearsal a young child, yet with an innocent ear, understood aright – and left in tears. Heptachor, strictly giving priority to what is in the music, find resources in this ancient setting for a powerful ritual of dance. They wisely use stillness and tension to give weight to youth and lightness, as well as breaking into the bursts of jagged movement which the music demands. At the end, in the near dark, they light kerosene torches, and in a circle of rhythm and light realise the ecstatic heart of pliaska. In the world outside the amphitheatre the sun has set, and in the world inside the amphitheatre music and dance recreate the fear and mystery of this swallowing-up of life and the unspeakable awe with which the human spirit depends on the return of the sun. In one section of the music, at a moment of repeated tense notes, the crouched dancers bring to life the snake which, in the earliest myths, swallows up and gives out again the sun. A woman emotionally thanks the dancers. The dancers, not knowing what to do with themselves after such tension, at first just breathe with relief that the torches had actually taken light (in rehearsal they had not!). Then they stand in a semi-circle for what, after the experience of the pliaska, must seem like the trifles of polite exchange with the interviewer for the Crimean TV, the culture channel making a programme based on the whole concert.
There are, certainly, different ways to judge festivals. Some critics presuppose that there is a single professional standard, and such critics would look for, and find, ‘mistakes’, of the kind which performers who have trained all their lives are supposed not to make. These critics impose a standard taking the heavily-funded spectacle and the star performer of the international circuit as an ideal. In doing so, they may miss the value of what is accomplished at Chersonesos, if we judge in relation to the appropriateness, the harmony, of what people create for themselves in the circumstances of their own lives and offer to an audience not familiar with the best parterre seats at the Bol’shoi. The question is how the performance, taken as a whole and not just broken into parts, enlarges the lives of all those who take part, spectators and performers alike.
The studios performing in Chersonesos receive no support beyond the generous opening of the amphitheatre by the museum administration, and the loan of lighting from the Sevastopol’ Russian Drama Theatre. First of all, then, we should appreciate what it means to create a shared way of life, a shared enthusiasm in seeking an expression of beauty, a shared joy in finding the expressive vocabulary of beauty in music. These highly serious and committed concerts at Khersones exhibit a joy in bringing to life and giving a distinctive character to music which highly professional performances, with their technically brilliant displays and fixed smiles, do not have. There is an aesthetics of the performance achieved without money, without ‘show-biz’, but with dedication and spirit, which, many viewers might think, has a purity and clarity much more in tune with what we imagine are Greek ideals – and much more in tune with the waves breaking on the limestone rocks beyond the amphitheatre and with the setting and the rising of the hot sun. Professionalism and beauty are not to be confused; they may or may not go together. Each of the four studios taking part in the festival has worked hard and long to bring the highest standards into their dance and song. And these concerts show that beauty can be found, that there is still free spirit abroad in the twenty-first century.
It is dark by the time the amphitheatre is cleared. There is neither sun nor moon now, only the vault of the stars and the gentle sound of the sea. The stars slowly turn, day will return. Meanwhile, in the nearby courtyard of the gallery, performers and friends gather together, with local wine and food, warmth, life and hope in the great universe.
