Oleg Gabyshev – Theatre Press

The fervid life in dance of a great artist

By Bradley Storer

In addition to their season of Anna Karenina, the Eifman Ballet also presents their original production Tchaikovsky, an expressionistic journey through the composer’s life and imagination set to his own music.

We begin at Tchaikovsky’s death bed as he is tormented by fever dreams and hallucinations, chased by phantoms from his own creations. As he retreats further into his mind we are taken into flashbacks from his life, his disastrous marriage, his insecurities and inability to connect with others, either romantically or in society at large.

Throughout the performance, Oleg Markov as Tchaikovsky danced the role with an intense but wounded poeticism, forming the impression of a man with immense genius but an equally great terror of rejection and loneliness. He was matched in brilliant lyricism by the Double (Oleg Gabyshev) and the Prince (Ivan Zaitcev), projections of Tchaikovsky’s inner turmoil and ideals of perfection. In the dances between these male characters, there is an equal balance of wonder and veiled eroticism.

Tchaikovsky’s fear of women becomes refracted and split into figures of monstrous femininity, the dark fairy Carabosse, the Queen of Spades, and a mysteriously malevolent bride who entangles him in her wedding veil. His wife (played here by Natalia Povoronzuik) unfortunately receives little time to create a full impression, and comes off a little flat and one-dimensional.

Tchaikovsky’s patroness and lifelong friend Nadezha von Meck (played by Nina Zmeviet) receives better treatment, becoming almost as equally important in the performance as Tchaikovsky himself – she becomes the audience’s main focus of empathy as we see her supporting and reaching out to the doomed composer, and her pain as he slowly slips away from her.

Because the dreamscape of the ballet is so fractured and fluid, the narrative becomes imagistic and can be a little difficult to follow without the aid of a program. Ultimately it seems like no overall message is being communicated in Tchaikosvky’s story – we see him live and we follow him to his death, but I personally was left unmoved at the end of the ballet. However, it is a world-class production with amazing performances and brilliant dances, and is well worth a visit by any ballet aficionado.

Sept 7-9, 8pm Fri-Sat, 2pm Sat-Sun

Regent Theatre Melbourne

Book online at Ticketmaster

Rich, rampant and inspiring theatre

By Bradley Storer

In a rare treat for Melbourne audiences, the internationally renowned Eifman Ballet Company bring their acclaimed fusion of Russian classical ballet and contemporary dance to our shores. The company’s aim, under the direction of choreographer Boris Eifman, is the creation of new ballet repertoire that attains the same psychological and thematic complexity as modern drama whilst exploring the sublime physical dimensions which other artforms cannot approximate. The classic Tolstoy epic, Anna Karenina, certainly qualifies in terms of grandeur and depth, and the Eifman Ballet explores the possibilities of this mammoth novel to their fullest extent.

Ballet by its nature requires plots that can be communicated simply, and in this respect the multilayered and complex narrative of Anna Karenina might have been a poor choice. However, by stripping back the story to focus centrally on the love triangle between Anna, Karenin and Vronsky, the most visceral and powerful elements of the original text are brought to the forefront.

The chorus skilfully express the smothering and oppressive social atmosphere of the St Petersburg court in their tightly formalized and compact dances, gorgeously outfitted in refined dark and grey outfits (alternating with the sleek black leather of the upper aristocracy) which renders them all grandly uniform. Against this unvarying palette come the ill-fated lovers Anna (played in this performance by Maria Abashova) and Vronsky (Oleg Gabyshev), their dances weaving in and out of the static patterns of the chorus burning to be free. Abashova’s achingly beautiful dancing begins trapped inside societal confinements imposed by both court and her husband, and through the first act Abashova shows the soul inside slowly waking to love. Gabyshev is a youthful and virile presence throughout, and when the pair finally consummate their growing passion in a stunning pas de deux, we see the full grace and beauty of their movements, hitherto hidden and stifled, break through the surface at last.

Oleg Markov as Karenin shows us his character’s hopeless entrapment with the bounds of society, the audience aware every moment of Karenin’s simultaneous yearning and inability to break free of the rigid movement imposed on him – when Karenin and his wife dance together, they resemble two puzzle pieces which will never quite fit together.

In Act Two, where Anna and her lover are relegated to the fringes of Russian society as a result of her affair, we delve into deep psychological exploration of the characters’ despair as Vronsky turns to drink and Anna to morphine addiction. The morphine-fuelled fantasy of flesh which Anna dreams is one of the more abstract and challenging aspects of the production, but the final scene which follows provides a thrilling coup de theatre which both matches and heightens the intensely operatic ending and cements this company’s reputation as boundary-pushing and artistically awe-inspiring theatre-makers.

Dates: 29^th August to 2^nd September, 2012

Price: $55 – $190

Venue: Regent Theatre, 191 Collins St, Melbourne

Bookings: www.ticketmaster.com.au