There is no doubt about it – Perm is leading the way at Russia’s National Theatre Festival, in numerical terms at least: the productive past season has seen the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre take four shows to Moscow – two operas and two ballet programmes. TATYANA KUZNETSOVA watched the four competing performances and one non-competition ballet at the Novaya Opera Theatre, and felt sorry for her favourite – Jiří Kylián’s staging of Les Noces. 

Les Noces, written by the Czech genius in 1982 and brought to Perm in June 2012, was not competing, but instead was shown alongside the performance of Gereven, the ballet commissioned by the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre, composed by Vladimir Nikolayev for the same group of instruments (percussion, four pianos, opera soloists, and choir) that Stravinsky used for Les Noces. This world première, which burst onto the stage last autumn, was a coproduction between Perm and Kiev: Gereven was staged by choreographer Radu Poklitaru, and performed by artistes from his company at the Kiev Modern Ballet: the performers from Perm, at that point immersed in their study of Forsythe, did not have the time to master the physiological language of Poklitaru as well. 

There was a striking contrast between the deliberate vulgarity of Poklitaru’s staging in the Kievperformers’ assiduous performance and the intelligent restraint shown by the company from Perm, who focused primarily on conveying Kylián’s extremely complex text with the greatest of accuracy. And, to the great surprise of this Kommersant reporter, it worked mainly in favour of Gereven: the audience’s excitement at Nikolayev’s lively music, heard in Moscow for the first time, multiplied by the animal-like energy that poured out of the performers from Kiev, outweighed the aesthetic delights delivered by the ‘small, mad wedding’, as Kylián himself defined the genre of his ballet. In truth, the ‘madmen’ in the sincere, pure performance by the Perm company, just fell short: the temperament and all the sensual passions of Les Noces drained into the orchestra pit, where Teodor Currentzis and his musicians created a separate celebration of improbable emotional intensity. 

The second nominated programme, Du Côté De Chez Diaghilev, combined two of Balanchine’s ballets (Monumentum Pro Gesualdo (1960) to Stravinsky’s score and Kammermusik N2 (1978) to music by Hindemith) with Prokofiev’s The Jester, as staged by Artistic Director of the Perm company Alexey Miroshnichenko. This was also a programme of contrasts. The sterile minimalism of Monumentum Pro Gesualdo, in which seven pairs punctuated curtseys and grand academic holds with the ritual angularity of an old-time Sarabande, should have brought out the drive of Kammermusik N2, with its virtuoso solo parts and the weaving of broken lines from the male corps de ballet. The Perm company successfully pulled off the ceremonial monumentality of the eight-minute Monumentum (although, to be honest, the audience, not expecting such a strict performance, did not appreciate it), but in Kammermusik N2, the light humour and teasing typical of Balanchine’s later work did not get through to the audience. This was the fault of the dancers, too serious and reverential to the legacy of Mr. B. However, the quality of all of the dancing was high, especially from the two soloists – Natalia Domracheva and Kseniya Barbasheva. Balanchine’s combinations flowed in a cascade of wit and technical complexity in the impetuous codas, and both ballerinas performed them with ease. But such was the strict academicism that accompanied it, that only specialists could appreciate the soloists’ mastery of the dance. 

The Jester crowned this wide-ranging programme fromPerm. Diaghilev’s company performed the première of this ballet in1921, a work written by a composer (Prokofiev wrote the extremely detailed libretto in person) and an artist (Mikhail Larionov acted as the producer, hiring the dancer Slavinsky as his assistant). Without a real choreographer, the ballet was understandably not successful, and the extremely luscious set designs and music were forgotten for 90 years, until Alexey Miroshnichenko and Perm Theatre decided to revive the Diaghilev company’s famous failure. The best thing about the ballet was the reconstruction of Larionov’s sets: six full scenery changes, phenomenally rich in their painting and fantasy. The artist Tatiana Noginova designed the costumes, which matched the futuristic print of the set design (Larionov’s original costumes, inordinately voluminous and heavy, would have made dancing impossible). 

But Alexey Miroshnichenko’s choreography was too ‘cultured’ and fractured for the sprawl of the buffoonery. The postmodern jokes (like the Merchant’s romantic adventures à la Prince Siegfriedwhilst mourning the death of Kozlukh, or the peaceful little duets between the Jester and his wife, quoting classical work The Flower Festival in Genzano and the corps de ballet backup dancers from The Sleeping Beauty) did not fit well here. And the technical complexities (like the seven jesters’ solemn sections of entrechat or the abundant virtuosity of the title role) did not come across anywhere near as well as the simple pantomime scene, where the Jester, disguised as a girl, sits at a spinning wheel, shy of the lustful looks of his seven counterparts. Overall, the ballet felt like a fruity, lower-class joke, rehashed at length by an educated, elderly woman trying to avoid swearing. Nevertheless, this genre has its admirers, including amongst the Golden Mask judges.