Eifman Ballet Makes Chekhov's `Seagull' a Four-Way Soap Opera

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on April 20, 2007.

April 20 (Bloomberg) -- The Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg, Russia, is recognizable at a glance.

The dancers are as flexible as rubber bands and emotionally stretched to the snapping point; the stage patterns are exercises in simple geometry; the lifts acrobatic; the gestures extravagant.

There's nothing soft or subtle in the choreography of Boris Eifman, 60, yet it can be crudely effective. It looks like animated poster art.

The repertory for the troupe's season at the City Center, in New York, features ``The Seagull,'' which had its premiere in St. Petersburg in January. Eifman, who has already co-opted Tolstoy's ``Anna Karenina'' and Dostoevski's ``Brothers Karamazov,'' has now turned to Chekhov.

He has pared the chief characters to four and turned Chekhov's subtle, penetrating tragicomedy into a semi-abstract psychodrama. All desire and anguish, it operates, remorselessly, at fever pitch, with music by Rachmaninoff and Scriabin.

Rather than sticking with Chekhov's world of words (writers and actresses) Eifman has shifted the action to the dance stage. His protagonists are a celebrated ballerina past her prime (Nina Zmievets), her rising-star rival (Maria Abashova) and a pair of male choreographers who represent stultifying tradition (Yuri Smekalov) and the cutting edge (Dmitry Fisher). When not occupied with professional competition and generational conflict, the four tangle themselves, soap-operatically, in personal passions.

Ballet About Me

Eifman, whose self-importance is robust, has declared that the ballet is autobiographical, with him as both the established master and the renegade. But his choreography for ``The Seagull'' represents both modes with nothing more than cliches.

Many passages are just peculiar. To indicate male-male confrontation, one guy literally walks up the other's body. For lovemaking, a man manipulates a woman's body as if he aimed to turn her inside out. A gratuitous insert of hip-hop dance just confirms that classically trained dancers haven't got the moxie for these moves.

The most truthful -- and unflamboyant -- scene in the ballet has the reigning choreographer confronted in a dimly lit studio by his assembled dancers. They form a living wall facing him, stony-faced, then stalk him in a circle, as if demanding to be brought to life in new and wonderful ways.

Other choreographers have described the terror of that situation in words. Eifman managed to realize it choreographically. It's the one autobiographical element in the piece that inspires belief.

Pink Floyd

The company is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, and its first night at the City Center was a tasting menu of excerpts from key Eifman works. It included the soft-porn duet ``Double Voice,'' to rock music by Pink Floyd, with which Eifman defied the repressive Soviet authorities in 1977. To American dance fans, bred in a more permissive climate, the piece would have seemed behind the times in its day; 30 years after the fact, its naivete is truly embarrassing.

The program opened with the world premiere of the first item in the troupe's repertory created by a choreographer other than Eifman: ``Cassandra,'' by the 28-year-old, Moscow-based Nikita Dmitrievsky.

The young choreographer is a chip off the old block. Using a Gustav Holst score like movie music, Dmitrievsky provides characters and narrative taken from mythology and history in their heroic modes (the doomed Greek prophetess, the fall of Troy), stage patterning that might have been plotted on graph paper, and a dance vocabulary of semaphored gestures meant to express extreme states of grief and rage. Somehow, though, the piece is not as over the top as Eifman's usual product (nor anywhere near as powerful as Martha Graham's 1958 ``Clytemnestra''). It's actually too tame.

The Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg continues at the New York City Center, West 55th Street, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, through April 29. Information: +1-212-581-1212 or http://www.nycitycenter.org.

© 2007 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.