The Theater of Boris Eifman: fantasies of a dreamer - tour of Boris Eifman's St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre - Cover Story

Dance Magazine, April, 1998 by Nina Alovert

This month's tour of Boris Eifman's St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre will introduce America to a master of contemporary dance drama.

Boris Eifman's St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre has existed for more than twenty years, but it is now touring the United States for the first time. There are no companies comparable to Eifman's in the world of Russian ballet. It is the only contemporary troupe that has attained stability--it continues to evolve and to earn acclaim, and it has received all the major Russian theatrical awards. When the troupe visited Moscow in September 1997 to perform at the Bolshoi, it was the first modern company to have the honor of dancing on such a prestigious stage. Eifman celebrated the twentieth anniversary of his troupe, as well as his own fiftieth birthday, on that occasion. The company had won not only the love of the audience but also official recognition. Eifman's ascent, however, has been riddled with obstacles; this choreographer can truly be considered a self-made man.

For as long as Eifman can remember, he has choreographed and performed his own dances. At thirteen, while studying at the Kishinev Ballet and Music College, he started creating dances for his peers. At fifteen he came to Leningrad, where he met renowned choreographer Leonid Jacobson (with whom he remained friends until the master's death in 1975). Eifman asked, "How does one become a choreographer? Jacobson answered, "Choreographers are born!" Eifman decided to continue his professional training at the Leningrad Conservatory under the gifted modern choreographer Georgi Aleksidze while also studying the structure and aesthetics of Yuri Grigorovich's ballets. Such are his "Russian roots," but he really created himself. His uniqueness became apparent with Gayane, set to the Aram Khachaturian score, staged in 1972 at Leningrad's Maly Theatre of Opera and Ballet. This full-length ballet, Eifman's senior project, did not seem like the debut of a novice but the result of seasoned artistic conceptions. The ballet was a huge success and remained in the theater's repertory for twenty-three years.

After graduation, Eifman was invited to stage ballets for the Leningrad Choreographic School, and in 1975 he staged his original production of Igor Stravinsky's Firebird at the Kirov. Offers to stage conservative Soviet ballet productions followed, but now Eifman's visions were for a different style of theater. Fortunately, he received an offer in 1977 to head a small company under the auspices of the Gosconcert organization to develop a theater for young people. Ballet for them, he decided, must speak in a musical language that they could understand.

The first programs were based on rock and jazz and combined classical dance with rock and roll and acrobatics, a mix of technical styles that became the basis of his future works. At the time, any movement away from academic ballet impressed audiences as a symbolic act of freedom. Young people flew to the new theater, but survival was still a struggle. Initially, there was no place to rehearse. Government subsidies were miserably low; foreign tours, the real meal tickets for the troupe, began much later.

The biggest obstacle, however, was Soviet censorship. Eifman was expected to produce highly patriotic spectacles about "happy Russian youth." Instead, he presented themes of life and death and complicated romantic relationships in unusual choreography that alarmed the censors. Eifman says, "In the West, the search for one's path is the norm. In Russia, it is the mark of outcasts." Some officials constantly hinted that, as a Jew, Eifman could always emigrate (those in charge could have done quite well without having the innovator around); however, the choreographer wanted to work in Russia. "They constantly attempted to shut us down," said Eifman. "We fought back as much as we could and managed to triumph because the regime grew weak."

The character of Eifman's theater as well as the style of his choreography was fully developed by the late eighties. In 1991, The Murderers, based on Emile Zola's Therese Raquin, began his stream of masterpieces--Tchaikovsky, The Karamazovs, Don Quixote, and Red Giselle--with philosophical plots (in the Russian ballet tradition), full of colorful theatrical expression and sharp dramatic conflicts, with full use of cinematic as well as theatrical devices. "We create a spectacle with a complete plot outline--rising action, climax, and resolution," says Eifman, "but it is not a dramatic play, not a retelling of the story. It is a ballet. Using the movement of the body, we try to express the protagonist's inner life, his emotions. I have always striven for the dramatization of the dance, the physicalization of emotions of the soul."

Eifman believes that only by emotionally involving the audience can he make them understand the ideas of the show--the problems of love and death, themes of good and evil, power and freedom, clime and consequences. An Eifman ballet is a solitary stream of choreography with amazing dueling duets and complicated scenic ensembles. Classical ballet is the foundation of Eifman's choreographic language (it is the only Russian school): "I can blend fouette with flamenco and break [dancing]. The main thing is the ability to express stronger emotions. I feel that the future of ballet is dance based on various technical styles. Classical dance can be considered the basis of my choreography, but, realistically, it is the free dance of emotions."