Repertoire

Up the river

music by Olexander Rodinballet in one act

Duration: 0:27 (27 min)
Acts: 1
Age: 12+
Staging: Radu Poklitaru — Honoured Arts Figure of Ukraine

The premiere of the production took place on April 25 2017

Going against the flow, and even from infancy, it is so difficult that at some point you want to buy yourself a new life. So did the protagonist of this performance, born 70 years old shaggy old man and living backwards - as an old man clever, with a hardened body, and at the same time as a child helpless in everything that concerns interaction with people.

A very difficult task for an artist is to show a consistent transformation of a person from deep old age to childhood in 27 minutes. Unlike the original source - the story of Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" - in the production of Radu Poklitaru, instead of 4 generations of Batton men, more action is given to women. The wife of the protagonist, the daughter (adult and small), the mistress (the duet with which is one of the most beautiful places of the performance) and the granddaughter are a whole female world, next to which the life challenge and loneliness of the central character appear even sharper.

That's really true, "blessed is he who was young from his youth": the Man in Black is watching the suffering hero - the one who is not in the Fitzgerald story. Someone in whose hands the hero's chance to replay all over again. This mystical figure in a long cloak, it seems, has neither human nor historical age (the rest of the industrial era is easily recognizable by the rest), enters the stage through the door, behind which a blinding light, and gives the story a completely different scale. The hero will kiss the Man in the black hand and sell his life to live it differently.

But he will not be able to change anything. Even the Man in Black does not have power over the hero's special lot - again an old man, then a mature and young man, and finally again a boy who sets off a cry in a column of dense stage smoke. This performance is a very unusual unfolding of the old vanitas genre, which allegorically represents the futility of vain claims of power over destiny.

The premiere was held on April 25-26, 2017

About the show

The premiere of the performance took place on April 25, 2017

Radu Poklitaru

I have long been attracted to the plot of The Story of Benjamin Button, as the basis for creating a ballet performance. The challenges that the story about human life lived in reverse throws to the director and the leading actor seem to be insurmountable at first glance, but ... What could be more interesting than practically impossible creative tasks?

As a result, in the libretto of my play you can see not only the plot allusions of the story of Scott Fitzgerald, but also echoes of the great "Faust" of Goethe. At the same time, "Up the river" is an absolutely author's narrative, since the specificity of modern dance does not allow making choreographic inscription from literary primary sources. I am happy that I was able to put together a great team to work on the performance:

Composer Alexander Rodin, who wrote his emotional string quartet, which became the ballet musical score.

Costume designer Dmytro Kuryata, who has already created several performances for the Kiev Modern Ballet Theater. These performances have become real bestsellers, beloved by viewers of Ukraine and other countries.

The artist Alexander Druganov, the author of the video, which is accompanied by the play "Up the River", created for our theater the wonderful world of the ballet "Crossroads", which became a real event in the cultural life of Kiev