Risque Ballet

Choreographer Boris Eifman’s career was very close to fizzling out in the late 80s, before he had even begun to really make a name for himself. Criticizing his work as “pornographic,” the Soviet authorities of the time censored and banned his sexualized, experimental ballets, refusing state funding and threatening to forcibly shut his operations down.

Despite the popularity of his troupe with the public, Eifman was reaching the end of his tether. The lack of fixed venue and the constant pressure to raise finances were taking their toll. He began work on Master and Margarita, believing that it might very well be his swansong.

As in a good Greek drama, it was when the dance composer was at his lowest that the moment of peripeteia came. When the time arrived to present his latest phantasmagoria in 1987, perestroika was gripping the nation. Much to Eifman’s surprise, Master and Margarita was what new Russia wanted: innovative, avant-garde, exciting. A visible demonstration that the repression of the old regime was no more. Once labeled a dissident, he was now hailed as a genius in the vanguard of a fresh era.

Fascination with the consequences had he been less timely seems to have influenced Eifman's choice of subject matter. "It is an instinctive desire of an artist," he says, "to find the answers through work... to the questions in your mind, to look inside your own inner world."

Drawing from history, several of his ballets depict the lives of artistic talent checked: Moliere in Don Juan and Olga Spessivtseva in Red Giselle are both, directly or indirectly, the victims of political machinations that crush their talent in the churning wheels of governmental conservatism, leading to identity crises.

Eifman Ballet, however, is steering well clear of such overt critiques in the pieces it's bringing to China. Both Tchaikovsky and Russian Hamlet stick to Eifman’s favorite formula: tormented individuals with splintering psyches. Where Tchaikovsky narrates the composer’s struggle with his sexuality, interspersed with hallucinations of Drosselmeyer and Carabosse, Russian Hamlet superimposes the troubled youth of Emperor Paul I over Shakespeare’s classic tale, dramatizing the murder of his father and the subsequent yearning for revenge on the perpetrator.

"I was interested in the mysteries of the human soul," explains Eifman, "and, as a result, of human lives full of suffering and pain. While working on them, I can discover a way to solve many philosophical questions that are important to me, to better understand the emotional and mental essence of human nature." By pushing his characters to the verge of sanity, breaking down their worlds, he attempts to reveal the fundamental core at the heart of mankind.

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Embarking on an odyssey of exploration, the impresario was determined to forge his way across any streams of controversy. “There shouldn’t be any esthetic prohibitions for the artist,” he says, insisting on the necessity of taking control out of any authoritarian watchdog's hands and laying the burden of fashioning something valuable solely at the feet of the creator: “The giftedness of an artist who has decided to be artistically provocative has great importance. If it is a talented person who breaks the rules, the art will develop; and if it is a person who has no gift at all or is just a sharp cynic, aiming at advertising and publicity, it will lead to decay.”

Sexual proclivity was one of the main elements that contributed to Eifman’s reputation as an enfant terrible in the Russian ballet world. Charged with moments of intense eroticism, his choreography gleefully challenges stigma and prudery. Tchaikovsky premiered in 1993, the same year that Russia decriminalized homosexuality, and included scenes of men ripping one another’s shirts and pawing at one another’s taught muscles, while elsewhere Tchaikovsky’s neglected wife has a ménage a quatre. Russian Hamlet, which debuted six years later, is no less shocking with its depictions of orgies in the court of the revered Catherine the Great.

“All specific features of my productions are the result of my view of life,” explains Eifman. “I see this life as a world of passions, blazes, burning emotions. Sex is not just bare mechanics, but a magical union of man and woman; not only physical, but also mental and spiritual.”

Several critics have questioned whether Boris Eifman’s choreography strays beyond edgy, intelligent boundary-transgression into the realm of sensationalist, provocative bawdiness. Some say the Freudian psychology of his plots is old-fashioned and passé.

In spite of this he continues, indefatigably, in a continuous flurry of activity, creating new works with an almost clockwork regularity.

Rodin, the Eifman Ballet’s latest production, looks at the relationship between the famed French sculptor Auguste Rodin and lover Camille Claudel, visualizing “the price that great artists have to pay for their masterpieces.”

Within the mechanics of the action, Eifman has again been trying to unravel the enigma of the human self. “I was incredibly interested in the inner world of Rodin and Camille,” he says, “in the mysteries of their emotional and mental life… We combined the plastic world of Rodin and Claudel with our own view of the human body as a means of perceiving the soul.”

The explanations make his process sound simultaneously like a form of therapy and a method of philosophical inquiry. Rather than using words to argue metaphysics, he uses ballet.

Searching for the perfect story, whether historical or literary, to act as a vehicle for his grand aim, Boris Eifman is on a constant mission to translate the synergy and strife between mind and body into the frenzy of the dance.

// Jan 13 Tchaikovsky, Jan 14 Russian Hamlet. RMB200-1.080, 7.15pm. Shanghai Grand Theatre, 300 Renmin Dadao, by Huangpi Bei Lu 人民大道300号, 近黄陂北路

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We’ve got three pairs of tickets for Russian Hamlet to give away. To win, simply answer the following question:

In which city is the Eifman Ballet based?

Answers towin@urbanatomy.com by Jan 9 with the subject “Eifman.”