For more than 140 years, Leo Tolstoy's tome Anna Karenina has touched readers around the world. Tonight, the ballet of the same name, based on the novel, is dancing in Shencheng to kick off the new season at the Shanghai Oriental Arts Center. Known as the "new business card of Russian ballet", the Eifman Ballet performed with great enthusiasm, using ballet to discuss with the audience the Anna Karenina who was "martyred for love".
On the East Art Stage that night, Angola Parklova used dance postures to show the heroine's inner entanglement, contradiction and pain, Anna and Vronsky's male and female double dance echoed each other, and the emotions were heated up and sublimated in the repeated lifting rotation, which also indicated that there was a hidden destructive power in extreme love. And Karenin has always shown people in black, with the back hand pacing, arm-hugging squat artistic action to create a restrained and old-fashioned image, he and Anna's double dance movement centrifugal and unbalanced, with many reverse pushes and collisions to reveal that the pressure of marriage and public opinion is insurmountable. The solo dance passages of the three men visualize their respective contradictory inner worlds, and the artistic creation of the Eifman Ballet renews the concept of Classical Russian ballet, pushing the emotional expression and dramatic conflict of ballet to the limit.
Maintaining national and artistic identity, modern ballet needs to find identity
Known as the "New Business Card of Russian Ballet", the Eifman Ballet was founded in 1977 by choreographer Boris Eifman and has twice appeared on Stage Toeigen to perform Anna Karenina. Bringing a book like Anna Karenina to the stage is a huge challenge for any choreographer. How to portray a new image of Anna outside the reader's deep-rooted impression is a difficult problem that Boris Eifman must overcome. He omits Tolstoy's own threads in the complex storyline, focusing on the emotional entanglements of Anna, Karenin, and Vronsky.
In Anna Karenina, Eifman, who favored Tchaikovsky, chose 17 excerpts from Tchaikovsky's music, such as the third movement of "Pathos" of the Sixth Symphony, which shows Anna being spurned and isolated by high society, and "Romeo and Juliet's Fantasy Overture", which sets off anna's tragic atmosphere of illusions in despair and helplessness. Tolstoy's original works are full of dramatic tension, and the music of the Russian composer Tchaikovsky of the same origin makes the dance drama more full.
This is the third time that "Anna Karenina" has been performed on the East Art Stage, and the dance company has not made new adjustments to the dance drama this time. But in Eifman's view, ballet is a creation with vivid vitality, and every new dancer in the company will bring his own dance tone and emotional color into the work, so there will not be two exactly the same ballet performances.
This time, in addition to the opportunity to "brush up" "Anna Karenina", Shanghai audiences can also enjoy the ballet "Brothers Karamazov" adapted from Dostoevsky's famous works.
Russian masterpieces such as Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov were brought to the ballet stage by Eifman, also out of his in-depth thinking about the current trend of modern ballet. "The widespread passion for fashionable dance movements has led to the dominance of uniform, even ballet works and a lack of identity. It is necessary for us to fight for the future and preserve what our illustrious predecessors have created. In Eifman's view, the practice of maintaining national and artistic identity in modern ballet applies to every country, any kind of art.
New Century choreography is close to contemporary audiences and pays attention to current issues
"Language is limited, while ballet performance is infinite. Ballet is able to depict the strongest inner experiences and the subtlest psychological changes. Dance has been a tool used by human beings to explore the mind since its inception, an energy nourished by feelings, and an art accumulated by our ancestors. With this artistic outlook, Eifman combines twentieth-century stage art and modern cinematic expression with ballet, making full use of all the elements of stage theater production to create colorful, three-dimensional dramatic effects. His single-handed ballet company showcases the highest level of contemporary Russian ballet art with works such as Tchaikovsky, Red Giselle, Anna Karenina, and Requiem, leading audiences into a new world of art.
In his works, the protagonists are mostly painful artists, struggling and dividing between the genius world and everyday life, and then moving towards a tragic ending that cannot be avoided, madness or death. "Stage work cannot create a character who lacks the passion for life, without the complex, dramatic life experience." Eifman had wanted to create a ballet about Freud, but there was nothing to write about in the life of the world-famous scholar: birth, hard work, death... That's all. This forced him to abandon the idea.
Eifman believes: "The choreography of the new century is to innovate, to be close to contemporary audiences, to pay attention to current issues, and to openly explore the complexity and drama of modern society." ”
In "Anna Karenina", the heroine and modern people have the same emotional needs, and they have the personality of modern women who dare to love independently but are shackled by the ideas of the times. The choice of love and marriage has been a hot topic in society until now. In Eifman's understanding, Anna did not understand the true meaning of love, her love for Vronsky, the desire for a new life, are all out of its exuberant vitality rather than the understanding of love, so in the last scene of Anna's death, Eifman uses the modern stage set to render the inevitable choice of a tragic female character in the predicament of the times.
In the ballet The Brothers Karamazov, Eifman reflects on this masterpiece of Russian literature. He concealed the father-killer in the choreography, and also removed the core justice paragraph in the original work, placing the main body of the male character on the elder Karamazov and his three sons, and constructing a world of no good and no evil after the collapse of faith and morality with a large number of group dances and exciting movements. All are engaged in a struggle of souls, ultimately finding a balance between reason and sensibility, light and darkness. In this way, he tried to make Russia's classic masterpieces transcend the times and reach the hearts of the current audience with a new attitude.
Author: Xuanjing
Edit: Xuanjing