XXIII Season Keynotes

Everything is mixed up and there’s nobody to tell,
That, gradually getting colder,
Everything is mixed up and it’s sweet to repeat:
Russia, of summer, of Lorelei.

Osip Mandelshtam (1917)

We live in a unique age, when the movement of the tectonic plates is synchronized with radical shifts in our consciousness, when the plant will be waiting another ten thousand years for a new ice age, but the glaciers of human souls have already reached a critical mass and started to generate hotspots.

You may ask what use there is to all these high-minded words – after all, we are just inviting an audience to a dance festival. But our fabulous ballet fairies are no lofty ethereal figures in their own cardboard kingdom – they are part of our world, and they make it better.

And we become better too when we open new horizons and broaden our worldview, when we try to understand each other, when we share our achievements and internalize others’ experience. As for new ideas, we all know they float in the air. That is why it is so important to throw open a window onto the world so that, breathing in the fresh air, some of us are inspired to create masterpieces, while others see in a choreographic text the ancient philosophy of their global neighbours and simultaneously learn something important about their own lives.

Something in today’s world really is “mixed up”. But something else has intertwined, age upon age and day upon day absorbing the best from those whose names are written in the history of choreography, weaving into this astonishingly beautiful knit of ideas and meanings.

This season, DANCE OPEN invites you to join the delicate and sensual  Li Pianpian  (Guangdong Modern Dance Company, China) on an imaginary journey Where and Wherever / 宿, trying to drag up from the depths of our souls memories of our own future. The romantic concept of the performance rests on the idea that, “If the end is the beginning, we are sure to meet again.”

But where does the point in question lie on the creative lifeline of Li Pianpian herself? Perhaps this graduate of Beijing Dance Academy, choreographer and director at Guangdong Modern Dance Company could find her roots, her “place of strength” somewhere here? This idiosyncratic family tree of world ballet was created for DANCE OPEN 2020 as part of the celebrations of the 170 th anniversary of the birth of Enrico Cecchetti, dancer and teacher for the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg and Sergei Diaghilev’s company. One of those who, at the beginning of the last century, contributed to the renewal of European ballet and its expansion to the New World.

Is it possible that, by inviting a ballet troupe from Guangdong to St. Petersburg, we are not just presenting our audience with a new company, we are in fact closing that very “Circle of Heaven”?

Continuing to chisel out a window – or rather windows – from St. Petersburg onto the world of ballet on all continents, and stubborn in its determination to remain truly international and bring the ballet community together, DANCE OPEN 2024 presents from Argentina the dance company of the “king of tango”, German Cornejo (not to be confused with  Herman Cornejo , the star of American Ballet Theatre, who has performed at the DANCE OPEN GALA more than once) with the show Tango After Dark.

The German Cornejo Dance Company has conquered the world with it vibrant and unpredictable shows. People are ready watch endlessly as, to the sound of a hoarse voice and the unmistakable music, the legs of the partners interweave at lightning speed, backs bend flexibly, and knees rise at sharp angles. Thus, two webs are woven, one of flashing steps, the other of passion.

One more foreign company taking part in the festival is Vuyani Dance (South Africa), presenting the performance Cion: Requiem for Ravel’s Bolero. The founder of the company is choreographer Gregory Vuyani Maqoma. He became interested in dance at the end of the 1980s – at the time it helped him distance himself from the atmosphere of political tension that dominated his homeland. Today, Vuyani Dance is the most famous modern dance troupe on the African continent.

The European continent, meanwhile, is represented at DANCE OPEN 2024 by Perm Ballet. One of the best companies in Russia, a proud inheritor of the Petersburg Imperial Ballet school, and of Russian and European cultural traditions, Perm Ballet is a frequent guest at the festival. And there’s no point in making some kind of special presentation – everybody already knows that you just have to go and see them if you want to keep up with the current context of choreography. The same praise can equally be applied to Perm’s near neighbours,  Ural Ballet from Ekaterinburg, although the latter already technically represent Asia – such is our geography.

— The ballet  Yaroslavna (Perm), to music by Boris Tishchenko, was staged by Alexey Miroshnichenko.
— The one-act ballets Pavilion of Armida / Hungarian Dances / Sextus Propertius (Ekaterinburg) were choreographer by Maxim Petrov /  Anton Pimonov  /  Slava Samodurov.

There is a neurobiological hypothesis according to which consciousness is formed at the moment when one part of the brain transmits information to another. If the prefrontal cortex “decides” that the transmitted information is sufficiently important, it sends a message to the larger structure knows as the “global workspace”, the place where experience is formed.

It's amazing how easily this concise idea can be scaled for different areas of human activity. The truth is that today we really are forming new consciousness by opening the “global workspace” that is the DANCE OPEN International Ballet Festival.