Five Russian choreographers, five domestic composers and five halls of the Pushkin Museum – the film “Slap”, the Russian premiere of which will take place in Moscow on March 31, appeared as a result of a joint creative experiment of the Aksenov Family Foundation, the State Museum of Fine Arts. Pushkin and the international festival of contemporary choreography Context. Diana Vishneva. Director Andrei Silvestrov, who had no previous experience of filming dance, and choreographers who had never worked in the halls of a museum of this magnitude (and even for filming), set out to stage dance opuses inspired by five periods in art history on modern academic music.
The starting point was the collection of casts of the Pushkin Museum. The choreographers were offered five museum rooms and five periods of the history of fine art: Antiquity, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. “It was an incredible challenge: I had never worked with ballet, and in my films there was no choreography more difficult than the ‘pen of a story’,” says Silvestrov. – It was an immersion in a new world and the experience of communicating with incredible, interesting artists, very different. I had to do everything so that the output would not be a “parade-alle”, but a film in which a whole statement emerges from polyphony ”.
Dance of five ages
The Cast was filmed in nine days at the end of 2020, while it took six months to prepare the project, from April to September 2020. Before starting rehearsals, and after them, and actually shooting, the director and choreographers repeatedly passed through the museum halls, and the curators told them again and again about the works and features of each era, the meanings that the exhibits convey. Most of the project participants have known the halls of the Pushkin Museum for a long time and quite well, nevertheless, many caught themselves that they still did not pay attention to how through the plastic of sculpture one can see the spirit of the times, its politics, the state and self-awareness of a person at that time.
“I was once again convinced how much dance and the museum space are connected, how they fill each other with meanings,” notes Diana Vishneva, who became the main heroine of the project. – Such a synthesis, and even with the involvement of composers and filmmakers, gives rise to a new genre. Together with my Context festival, it is very interesting for me to continue developing in this direction. The fusion of genres and styles is the art of the XXI century ”. Vishneva admits that as a classical ballerina she feels antique sculptures on a physical level. “In their motionless movements, there is the story of the whole dance,” she continues. – Therefore, I was interested in the dialogue with them in the language of choreography and cinema. It was interesting to look at the familiar from a new perspective. Moreover, my image in the film is a line or guide between different historical periods, different genres of art. I carry within me the memory of all generations. “
Diana Vishneva in the Michelangelo Hall
There was no drawing of lots in the project: each of the choreographers – finalists of the Context festival competition. Diana Vishneva of different years – got the right to choose the period of fine art closest to him. From these preferences and approaches to the topic, one can partly judge the worldview of each of them.
In the composition of Andrey Korolenko in the hall of art of Ancient Rome, dancers act as gladiators, and the choreographer asks about the Roman Empire’s aspiration for conquest and expansion at the cost of an uncountable number of lives, which sounds as relevant as possible. “In this work, as well as in comprehending the whole topic, there is no authoritarian statement by the choreographer, there is a joint collective search and an individual answer of each to the question, why, in principle, is there a war,” says the choreographer. The dance unfolds to the sounds of the Morendo composition by Mark Buloshnikov.
In the production of Lilia Burdinskaya in the hall of European art of the Middle Ages, the main motive was the image of a woman – Eve or Lilith, a nun or a witch. Citing the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch in plastic, the choreographer arranges six dancers in a procession and comes up with a secret “shameful language” for them, which turns out to be a secret even for the film crew.
In the Greek courtyard, among the casts of the pediment of the Athenian Parthenon, Anna Shchekleina and Alexander Frolov dance the process of destruction, both physical and emotional. This choreography tells a story virtually timeless.
Konstantin Semyonov, creating his composition for the hall dedicated to the art of Ancient Greece, was inspired by popular ancient mythology. The gods and heroes of the Olympic pantheon enter the scene, but their stories sound topical.
Well, Anna Shchekleina tells a love story in the hall of Michelangelo’s sculpture. The graceful and graceful dance duo is designed in the contemporary style, and the cameraman chose for this story shooting in the spirit of neorealism – rather, even cinema of the 1960s – 1970s, in particular, the style of Claude Lelouch’s film Man and Woman.
Parts of a new whole
It was not only choreographers who had to find a plastic language for each of the five eras. They composed the dance, while Silvestrov and the cameraman Daniil Fomichev, meanwhile, came up with the plastic movement of the camera. “Ancient Greece is almost no editing in one line, and the Middle Ages is already a multi-camera story filmed from eight points, sometimes forming a split screen, reminiscent of how different phases of a person’s life or phases of a plot development were depicted in the Middle Ages,” explains Sylvester.
To achieve the final integrity of the project, it still remained to find music. It was written by young Russian composers Vasily Peshkov, Alexey Retinsky, Mark Buloshnikov, Alexander Khubeev and Daria Zvezdina. The last three are laureates of the annual program Aksenov Family Foundation “Russian Music 2.0”, the purpose of which is to develop and update the traditions of the national school of composition and demonstrate its best achievements. “One of the Foundation’s strategic objectives is to work with the undiscovered potential of Russian contemporary culture on the world stage,” says Dmitry Aksenov, founder of the Aksenov Family Foundation. – Over the years of working with the Salzburg Festival, we realized that Russian composers who create important and popular works are of interest to the professional community, but there is no information about them. So the idea was born to create a program that identifies talent and stimulates the ordering system. The film “Cast”, which includes the works of the laureates of the program, has become an important stage in the implementation of the foundation’s mission – the creation of new approaches to the interaction of different languages of modern culture. “
Surprisingly, “Cast”, not yet having time to appear on the screen, opens up new facets of meanings to its creators. “The film is already living its own life, and we ourselves are still figuring out what we did,” says Vishneva. “In this project, we are not just referring to art history,” emphasizes Marina Loshak, director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. Pushkin. – It combines the work of choreographers, composers, a special view of the director and is a reflection of a modern person who perceives what is happening as part of contemporary art. This is not just a ballet on a certain theme, set to new music. We are talking about contemporary art and the new optics of an artist in the highest sense of the word, be it a painter, sculptor, musician or director. “
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