The Moiseyev Dance Company, which is arguably the leading Soviet contribution to contemporary world culture, vanished from Western sight 12 years ago. It was the victim of a ”freeze” in East-West relations aggravated by political defections from the Bolshoi Ballet and other Russian touring companies.
With a new regime in power in Moscow and the Reagan White House turning more conciliatory in its renewed efforts toward arms control, the freeze began to thaw in 1984, and, at last November`s summit, a new cultural exchange agreement was signed permitting visits to the United States by the Moiseyev, as well as the Kirov Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet and Opera and the Leningrad Symphony.
Although the Kirov made a limited appearance in the U.S. earlier this year, the first major event of this renewal of cultural relations is a 16-city tour of America by the Moiseyev that will bring the company to Chicago for three days of performances at the Arie Crown Theater Oct. 24-26.
Neither ballet nor pure folk dance, the productions of the Moiseyev company combine elements of both into a whole that is unique in the world of dance.
Igor Moiseyev, the still vigorous 81-year-old director of the troupe, himself a veteran of the Bolshoi Ballet when he founded the company that bears his name in 1937, has woven dances, theatrics, music, gymnastics and special effects together to produce a living work of art that fits in no category but its own, a work he constantly improves upon as an unsatisfied composer might a never-finished score.
There is much in the troupe`s present incarnation that is vintage Moiseyev: leaps through the centuries of Russia`s pre-revolutionary past reflected in Volga River animal dances, Moldavian round dances, Ukrainian peasant festival dances and some pure confections of Master Moiseyev himself. But he is a man of many parts, having lived for several years in France and traveled extensively about the world. He has borrowed from dances he has seen all along the way: from China, Japan, Turkey, Mongolia, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Sicily, Spain, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina and the U.S., where he became enamored of jazz and rock dancing, as well as the jitterbug.
It is not for nothing that the 155 members of the Moiseyev study and practice the disciplines of fencing, acrobatics, juggling, mime, musicianship and acting, in addition to classical ballet.
Moiseyev has added two spectacular dance acts to his repertoire, now being seen for the first time in the United States. But nothing important has been dropped from the repertoire to accommodate the additions to the program. ”My first idea was to bring to the United States a program of all completely new items which have not been seen here in the United States,”
Moiseyev said. ”But I was told it`s okay to bring the new items but that I must keep in the program some of the old ones Americans already know and love.”
The first of the new productions should delight ballet purists. It is an artful re-creation of a skating rink scene, in which the dancers move so smoothly over the stage they seem to be skating.
”At the Skating Rink” was created at the request of the Soviet government for the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.
”I was asked to make a dance that was close to a sport especially for this occasion, and after thinking for a while I decided that the closest thing would be skating,” Moiseyev said. ”At first, I wanted to stage a very, very short ballet, but in the process of working on it, it expanded and expanded.” Moiseyev said it is extremely difficult for dancers to perform the simulated skating routines, and that, because of interruptions for tours, it took some dancers two years to perfect the technique.
The second new production, Moiseyev`s piece de resistance, is an electrifying and in part very un-Russian dance sketch done largely to the music of Modest Mussorgsky`s tone poem ”Night on Bald Mountain” and inspired by the stories of Nikolai Gogol. At its climax, scantily clad demons and demonettes writhe and gyrate to primitive drumbeats in a sensual frenzy that makes sin seem truly glorious and wonderful.
The full production of the Moiseyev repertoire opens with a series of staples. The first, ”Summer,” is a traditional and romantic Ukrainian dance taken from Moiseyev`s dance suite, ”The Seasons.” It celebrates the betrothal of a young couple at the end of summer.
Next comes a Kalmuk dance featuring three men dressed in the black clothing of the Asiatic Kalmuk nomads who live around the Volga River delta. Their movements, as much mime as dance, simulate those of the animals important to these people, including horses, bulls and, most spectacularly, the eagle.
The ”Polyanka,” which follows, is another celebration of love and youth. It is set in a small Russian meadow where young people gather to enjoy the onset of warm weather. Their dancing is rather slow and formal at first, but then increasingly exuberant and ultimately explosive, with balalaikas and tambourines setting the musical pace.
Next comes the trademark piece of the Moiseyev: ”Partisans.” The dance depicts Soviet guerrilla fighters operating against the Nazis in the Caucasus during World War II, and includes a battle scene complete with machine guns. But it`s most notable for a sequence in which one contingent of dancers, with long military woolen cloaks masking the movement of their legs and feet, glide about the stage as though on horseback.
”Partisans” is followed by ”Zhok,” a three-part Moldavian piece, and the ”Old City Quadrille,” a highly stylized 19th-Century work of dance comedy.
”At the Skating Rink,” which comes next, catches the audience by surprise and leaves it breathless. With the aid of special lighting effects and a brief interlude of falling snow, the stage is transformed into a skating pond, the wintertime center for social activity in Russia.
This piece pushes the dancers to the limits of their formidable gymnastic prowess and dancing skill. Every skating and dancing form is presented, including a formal ballet pas de deux. By the time the curtain falls, it is impossible to believe the dancers are not wearing skates.
”Night on Bald Mountain,” which constitutes the second half of the show, is presented in two parts. The first scene is set at a Ukrainian country fair. An oafish peasant, Patsiouk, and two companions get very drunk wandering among the merrymakers, who include Cossack dancers and gypsies. As Patsiouk collapses in stupor, the music, a round of Ukrainian folk songs, segues into the passages of Mussorgsky`s tone poem.
The second scene deals with the peasant`s wild, drunken dream of a witches` sabbath, beginning with the startling appearance of a nearly naked demon. Soon the entire stage is aquiver with cavorting demons and deliciously sensual young girls, along with a ghoul and a devil or two. At the climax, the theater trembles with the reverberations of the drumbeats and the thudding feet. Then, as the violence of Mussorgsky`s music subsides, the hellish gang sidles away, leaving the terrified peasant to awake alone.
As Moiseyev explained in a backstage interview before one of the Kennedy Center performances, ”Night on Bald Mountain” is, to a certain extent, an autobiographical work for him, and the crowning achievement of his career.
”I spent my childhood in Ukraine, and Gogol was my favorite writer,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. ”To summarize the country stories of Gogol`s, I got the idea of staging a dance which would reflect the heroic figures which Gogol wrote of. In Gogol`s works, human beings, the human heroes who exist on Earth, lived together with mystery heroes from the other world
— the heroes of his imagination. Witches and devils appear.”
The work, though somewhat revolutionary for the Soviet stage, immediately won the USSR`s highest award for the arts, the State Prize.
”To some extent it is a step forward,” Moiseyev said, modestly. ”But our group is not exactly a ballet ensemble or troupe. You would call it more a theater. The dance reproduces the old Gogol theme, but there is irony in it because it also includes what happens in modern discotheques. This combination or dialogue of old theme and modern times is what makes what`s happening on the stage.”
Offstage, the company`s visit to the United States has been an eventful one, beginning on opening night at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, when a tear gas bomb was set off. Recalling the event, Moiseyev grew sad.
”We don`t associate it with all Americans,” he said. ”We feel this bomb actually disturbed the American people. We were very sorry for the audience. There were so many people in the house crying, and little children crying.”
Reminded of an earlier protest bomb in Chicago in the 1970s, he paused, to smile again.
”We are veterans on the cultural front,” he said.
Moiseyev said he was very fond of his visits to Chicago and especially liked the Art Institute, particularly because of its collection of some prized works of the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, one of the fathers of abstract art. (The Art Institute has 6 of his paintings and 15 of his prints and drawings.)
”He (Kandinsky) was ashamed of his love for abstract painting, and until his death many of his paintings were kept at home, just for himself, not for the general public,” Moiseyev said. ”That was his desire. His widow found in his workhouse there an endless number of his paintings — worth millions — and much was left to the Chicago museum. There is, in his works, a feeling. This is something that comes out, not from your head or your imagination but from your heart.”
