Poklitaru presents a new ballet: Christmas will be long, but with a turkey

The most popular motto of our fellow citizens this year sounded like “Who knows what tomorrow will bring?” Against the backdrop of such a perception of the situation, almost all artistic events revolved around and about the Maidan-and-Crimea, and later the Donbas, themes. At least as far as an artist might wish to delve into them… And if there suddenly appears a certain “The Long Christmas Dinner”, somewhere deep down you already feel a slight displeasure. What about civic duty, the war, the drama of peoples and generations?

Then you remember that it is, after all, a ballet, and you exhale a little… Although no, it is, after all, not just a ballet but Poklitaru, so speculation on “hot” topics and bloody scenes is not his sort of thing. This artist loves details, he loves life itself, and that is why his productions are drawn from certain places… that are, let us say, scarcely accessible to ordinary imagination. Now how can one make a dramatic story out of a single dinner? Even if, after Wilder, it is a Christmas dinner of different generations of the American Bayard family stretched out over 90 years?

In general, Thornton Wilder’s play is more readily imagined in some little basement of a provincial intellectual theatre. The actors gather around the table, talk about the weather, eat turkey, fall in love, give birth to children, eat turkey, talk about the weather, eat turkey… In a word, only Christmas and the turkey are relatively eternal. Yes, the generations change, members of the Bayard family are born and die… And yet this is life, the question being: where is the drama here?

And Poklitaru is, perhaps, the only choreographer in the world who can show so vividly the absence of life there where, it would seem, the very question of it has not even been raised. This is no Prince of Denmark, after all, whose story is fit to be brought before the public… Although that is precisely the point: Hamlet’s drama can be understood, and no one doubts the justice of the prince’s indignation. But here is another story altogether… Well, there is no meaning in the lives of millions of plain, ordinary people, of their families, and what can you do about it? Yet someone will make a ballet out of it…

“The Long Christmas Dinner” did not turn into a long Christmas slumber, thanks to the dynamic music of Vivaldi. The seasons again, the change of life cycles again… So perhaps this is, after all, where the meaning lies? Simply the change of spring and autumn, of the older generation and the younger. Radu Poklitaru, at least, is certain that it is not all so simple. Filling life with talk about the weather and the turkey is no way out; one must create at least one ballet-meditation. And what have you made this year?

You need not feel awkward in answering that same question: the maestro, too, has confessed that he is impelled to creativity by all the very same things as the Bayards and Hamlet:

— My stance is not at all original and resembles the stance of any person who has crossed the threshold of 40 years and knows how to think. We understand that little of our creative life remains. Creative energy thins out… My feeling is: too little time is left, one must urgently make something worthwhile. The Ukrainian public, strange as it may seem, reciprocates my feeling, showing this year an unbelievable filling of the auditorium. It is as if, the more culture is pressed down, the more the consumer says: oh no, I will come all the same! Although, of course, ballet is a highly conventional art, and we perceive it conventionally too. Ballets are not written for the topic of the day… Creating a metaphor takes time. That is why I will not speculate on attitudes toward politics or the Maidan. For me that is too much of “today”. Tomorrow — we shall see.

PIK