Press Release

EIFMAN BALLET THEATRE performs
Red Giselle & Tchaikovsky
Sadler's Wells
10 - 15 February 2003
Red Giselle, Mon 10 - Thurs 13 Feb, 7.30pm
Tchaikovsky, Fri 14 Feb, 7.30pm - Sat 15 Feb, 2.30pm & 7.30pm
Tickets £10 - £35. Ticket Office 020 7863 8000 www.sadlerswells.com

Pre-Performance Talk - Talking Dance:
Thurs 13 February, 6.30pm in Kahn Lecture Theatre with Giannandrea Poesio,
BSL interpretation by Jackie Beckford. Part of Deaf Debating Dance (FREE)

Celebrating St Petersburg's 300th anniversary in 2003, British audiences have the chance to enjoy modern, neo-classical Russian ballet on a dramatic scale when Eifman Ballet Theatre from St Petersburg performs at Sadler's Wells from 10 - 15 February. The company of 50 stunning dancers performs the British premières of two full-length works, Red Giselle and Tchaikovsky. Both are based on the lives of legendary Russian artists and choreographed by the Company's Founder and Director, Boris Eifman.

Red Giselle is based on the true story of Olga Spessivtzeva, one of St Petersburg's most brilliant and tragic ballerinas. Spessivtzeva's life mirrored her most famous role of Giselle, a young girl driven mad after being betrayed by her lover. Spessivtzeva was born in Russia in 1895 into a prosperous family, but she was orphaned at an early age. She studied at the Imperial Ballet School where she was spotted as an exceptional student and went on to international fame dancing in London with the Ballets Russes and at the Paris Opera. Her glittering career was thrown into chaos when the young ballerina was swept up by the Bolshevik Revolution and became involved with a secret police agent. She was finally driven into exile and descended into madness. Red Giselle is set to a score by Adam, Bizet, Tchaikovsky and Schnitke.

Tchaikovsky explores the private torments of the Russian composer who was torn between his craving for acceptance and his homosexual desires. The demons and wicked fairies of Tchaikovsky's own creation turn against him forcing him to confront the darkness of his own soul. The ballet is set to a selection of Tchaikovsky's music including Symphony No 5 E minor Op.64, Serenade for Strings Op. 48 and the finale of Pathetique.

Boris Eifman is Russia's leading modern ballet choreographer. After studying choreography at the Leningrad Conservatory Boris Eifman founded his own company in 1977. Eifman proceeded to confound Soviet authorities by systematically breaking every tenet of the Russian classical dance canon. His work, standing apart from his contemporaries in its constant emphasis on theatre, drama, spectacle, narrative and literature. Today, Eifman is the only contemporary Russian choreographer whose works are performed by the Bolshoi and Marinsky ballets. Eifman Ballet now regularly plays to packed theatres in New York.

<small>[ 20 January 2004, 03:24 PM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Wrapping up the loose ends
Boris Eifman’s Red Giselle honours a great dancer driven mad by life and love, says Clifford Bishop for The Sunday Times.


Claiming to be a Russian ballerina when you’re locked up in an American madhouse is not, perhaps, the best strategy for getting out. You might as well sew name tags in a straitjacket. It doesn’t help if, despite being an absolutely authentic Russian ballerina, you are also just as authentically insane. Olga Spessivtseva was arguably the greatest dancer of her generation, but every time she tried to explain this, during the 22 years she was held in a New Jersey asylum, she received the same response: “Don’t be worried, dear, we have many ballerinas.”
The Russian choreographer Boris Eifman has made a dance based on Spessivtseva’s life, called Red Giselle. “Nobody knows what really broke her mind,” he says. “Of course, she was born a little strange, but she saw so much blood, so many terrors.” She also had a uniformly disastrous taste in lovers. Spessivtseva was born in 1895 into a well-off Russian family, but after the death of her father, she was sent away to an orphanage.

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Article in the Guardian.

MORE

Red Giselle
From Woman's Hour on the BBC website


Olga Spessivtzeva was one of Russia's most famous and most tragic classical ballerinas, legendary as the greatest Giselle in the history of ballet. Her life imitated her role, and she descended into madness like the doomed Giselle.

Now the Eifman Ballet Theatre are telling the story of the life in Red Giselle at Sadler's Wells in London.

Claudia Hammond went in search of the real Olga.

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Red Giselle
By Judith Mackrell for The Guardian


Boris Eifman is often tagged as Russia's answer to Maurice Bejart, sharing the latter's taste for flamboyant stages and vaulting storylines. In Red Giselle (1997) he's certainly set the bar ambitiously high. Not only does he attempt to conjure the body and soul of the great Russian ballerina Olga Spessivtzeva, but in narrating her decline from stardom into madness he also tries to evoke the traumatic historical backdrop to her career.

It's a double act which requires Eifman to shuttle rapidly between social pageant and intense, symbolic close-up, but he manages to tell a complicated story in efficiently fast and broad strokes. The early scenes are the most conventionally balletic as the plot follows Olga's transition from dancer with the Imperial Ballet to prima ballerina of revolutionary Petrograd. But as her fragile personality is increasingly torn between the demands of her autocratic ballet master and her domineering Bolshevik lover, Eifman's invention starts to spark.

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New Russia struggles to find its feet
by debra craine for The Times


WITH a steady stream of Russian ballet companies bringing Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty to our shores, you would be forgiven for thinking that all they care about in Russia is the distant past. Which is why it makes a change to see the Eifman Ballet Theatre of St Petersburg, now in London, presenting choreography from the 1990s rather than the 1890s. So very different, but still so very Russian.

Boris Eifman founded his renegade company in 1977. Gone are the days when the Soviet authorities, alarmed by his “radical” choreography, tried to close it down. Today he’s a star in Russia and a regular visitor to New York. But London had yet to see his Red Giselle, which opened a week-long Sadler’s Wells season last night, or his Tchaikovsky, which closes it.

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<small>[ 11 February 2003, 06:08 PM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Simply not sublime enough
Ismene Brown for The Daily Telegraph reviews Red Giselle at Sadler's Wells.


The inimitable Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo traditionally warn their audience not to take flash photos during the performance, in case some of their more "fragile" ballerinas are deluded into memories of Bolshevik gunfire. How we laugh. But Boris Eifman's Red Giselle is about the real story of fragile ballerinas and Bolshevik gunfire, far from a laughing matter.

Eifman's 50-strong Ballet Theatre from St Petersburg is Russia's only internationally recognised modern ballet troupe - incredible, given that vast nation's devotion to ballet and its fecund artistic vision in so many arts in the past.

So in classic-bound Russia, he represents the new, both in "modernising" the ballet technique and in his desire to confront Russia's recent history, not least its ability to produce divine performing artists from the depths of murkiest historical events.

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this is a review from one of our new members who has not yet navigated his way around full posting:

Red Giselle is an Eifman triumph. The ballet, the true story based around the life of of the ballerina Olga Spessivtseva, is technically very strong and stylistically diverse. As we follow the development of the heroine's career, the audience is exposed to a rich mix of genres of music, customing and styles of dance. From the fluid and graceful dance of the ballerina's St. Petersbourg classroom and early theatre days, accompanied by soothing musical composition, we are introduced to the harsh sounds brought by Red Russia and the rigid and often contorted dance that it demands. Our heroinne eventually escapes the turmoil in her home city and flees to Paris. There we are exposed to yet another style of dance, music and custome. While clean and sharp, this dance is still foreign to Olga, who is not comfortable with it and tries to numb her pain by taking to the Paris party scene. Again, the audience is exposed to another style of music, dance and costume. The excitement culminates as Olga enters a nightmarish state, and is tormented by the spirit of the KGB officer of St. Petersbourg who was behind the harsh new order of Russian dance.
The performance is solid throughout. A technically talented company perform a varied and rich selection of dances. The show comes together tightly, and the audience is left with the satisfaction of having seen the excitement and flare of modern ballet in addition to the grace and elegance of traditional scores

by Juan Carlos Machuca

I have always admired Boris Eifman's courage in sticking to his guns in the Soviet era, which cannot have been easy. Thus I'm pleased that Eifman Ballet has had a positive reception to date for their first visit to the UK. Beforehand, I tried to get myself in a receptive frame of mind by thinking "dance theatre" rather than "Kirov".

The quality of the dancers impressed me and for the final quarter of "Red Giselle" I enjoyed the expressive performance of Vera Arbuzova and the supple dancing of Yuri Smekalov. In particular, the mixing of real and stage madness in a recreation of a Paris Opera Ballet "Giselle" was effective.

However, overall I found the style too melodramatic and in the case of the Ballet Master and the Secret Agent, the one-dimensionality of the characters diminished the power of the work for me.

Eifman's choreography can be distinctive, but is so often ugly that I didn't find it interesting. Mats Ek also uses ugly shapes in his ballets, but these are combined with breath-taking beauty, which provides an amazing resonance.

I can understand why Eifman produces such strong reactions, both pro and con, among dance enthusiasts, but personally I won't be rushing to see further examples of his ballets.

<small>[ 13 February 2003, 08:28 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

The company has some beautiful dancers, never more evident in the scenes with the 'classes' with the dancers in their romantic tutus. When they dance together, they REALLY dance together! I had high hopes but was a disappointed by the choreography. Well having watched one MacMillan pdd after another at the Royal Ballet this season, I guess the Eifmann pdds just couldn't compare. I found them so empty. And I agree Stuart, "too melodramatic" was all I could think about for most of the performance. Perhaps Red Giselle would have had more impact with a different choice of music. I couldn't put my finger on what I disliked so much about it but I later realized the mish-mash of Tchaikovsky, Bizet, the Charleston Kids, etc, etc made it look like the story was shifting aimlessly from scene to scene rather than watching a character unfold. I have to admit I was bored throughout Act I. I liked Act II a little better. I thought watching Olga dance Giselle from her perspective was spooky, and the ballerina Elenza Kuzmina just captivating. As heartbreaking as I found the final scenes with her trapped in the mental hospital, hands pressed against the smokey glass, I can't say I'm looking forward to 'Tchaikovsky' which I'll see on Saturday.

<small>[ 13 February 2003, 04:51 PM: Message edited by: sylvia ]</small>

AC Grayling enjoys Boris Eifman production at Sadler's:

Red Giselle
By AC Grayling for Online Review London

Imagine a dance tradition famous for its rigour and purity, its classical exactness, its weddedness to exquisitely proud line and movement, and its great tradition. Imagine a young adventurous choreographer, wishing he could move that tradition onwards, yet cut off from developments in dance elsewhere in the world, relying on his own resources of imagination and creativity to extend the vocabulary of his tradition, seeking to modernise it and to evolve its repertoire. Well: something almost exactly like this happened when, from the mid-1970s, Boris Eifman began trying to push ballet onwards in Russia, working from the country's majestic classical tradition towards new forms of expression. He did it alone, without the example and the inspiration of the talent and ideas that were burgeoning in the Western world of dance world.

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Requiem for the red queen
By Jann Parry forThe Observer

Although there have been productions aplenty about mad Nijinsky, Boris Eifman is unusual in taking a cracked ballerina as his subject. Olga Spessivtseva was born in St Petersburg in 1895 and rose to the top in the Imperial Ballet just as the Russian Revolution broke out. Dark-haired, doe-eyed and delicate, she was renowned for her Giselle and Aurora (a role she danced in Diaghilev's production of The Sleeping Princess in London in 1921).

The curse of Aurora's bad fairy godmother, Carabosse, eventually caught up with Spessivtseva when she ended her career in exile. After a nervous breakdown in the United States, she languished, forgotten, in a New Jersey mental asylum for 20 years. Her former colleagues believed her dead, until Anton Dolin tracked her down and arranged for her to be transferred to the Tolstoy Farm in New York State. She died there in 1991, aged 96.

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Madly, but not deeply
It’s a shame the Eifman Ballet’s exploration of insanity isn’t more engaging, says David Dougill for The Sunday Times.


Mention a legendary dancer whose stellar career was enshrined in superlatives, but disintegrated into mental breakdown, and most people would think of Vaslav Nijinsky — a life story that has been told in books, films and ballets. But he wasn’t the only one. Olga Spessivtseva (1895-1991), a great romantic ballerina of both pre- and post-revolutionary St Petersburg, renowned as a peerless Giselle, was also world famous at her peak, but faded from public memory during 20 years in a New Jersey mental home. Hers is the story the Russian modernist choreographer Boris Eifman tells in his ballet Red Giselle, which Eifman Ballet Theatre of St Petersburg brought to Sadler’s Wells last week. This is a big, spectacular production in expressionist style, which attempts a psychological study of the doomed ballerina against the backdrop of Russia’s political upheaval.

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TCHIAKOVSKY – EIFMAN BALLET THEATRE – FRIDAY 14th FEBRUARY – 7.30p.m.

Stuart earlier used the term “dance theatre” to describe this company and after seeing this dramatic company with their eclectic mix of dance styles I would be inclined to agree. The ballet Tchiakovsky handled at times a complex narrative swinging between many facets of Tchiakovsky’s life seen from the hallucinations of a dying man, and I have to say that without a synopsis the uninitiated may have been confused by the odd appearance of swans amongst demons and quite naturalistic corps de ballet scenes.

Some of the strengths of the production lay with the very strong and dramatic visual ensemble pictures created. From the classical and very pretty umbrella sequence in Act 1 to the cleaness and precision of the swans and in particular, the stunning athleticism of the male corps de ballet, it was the ensemble pieces that stood out for me and created some of the more memorable moments of the evening. The male corps perhaps had some of the more interesting choreography to interpret, it definitely had a more contemporary feel to it and there were some effective motifs developed during Act 1 which carried through into the dramatic “card table” scene in Act 2, which although visually dramatic stood quite at odds with the rest of the ballet for my own interpretation.

There has been some criticism so far as to the choreography of the pas de deux’. In Tchiakovsky, particularly the pas de deux’ between Tchiakovsky (Albert Galichanin) and his inner “self” (Alexei Turko), I found well executed. There were some moves that looked clumsy but on the whole the choreography here was slick and appropriate for the choreographers intentions with these two characters. Also some of the smaller group pieces were very effective and beautifully danced, in particular the Pas de cinq in Act One which had a great feeling of momentum with clever moving lifts and lovely flow to the line of movement.

The clever use of only some well chosen set objects, i.e a bed and the card table and a minimalist backdrop produced some very strong and clear visual design. The simplicity of design gave enough to suggest location but kept the stage void enough to also give suggestion of a dream/nightmare situation. Some of the most effective moments came when we had almost a bare stage with just Tchiakovsky going into some large company scenes. It is perhaps these dramatic shifts of focus in line with the changes in the score that the company handled best.

Combined with a dramatic and climatic score we also had some defining moments of silence with Tchiakovsky dancing and battling with his deteriorating state of mind. These moments were very effective in establishing an inner fight and with the use of a simple prop, a conductor’s baton, conjuring up thoughts of the creative process dying and the composers’ struggle with his now inability to create. This produced some of the most powerful and dramatic moments of the performance.

Overall the production handled a dramatic and complex narrative satisfactorily and have a slick but overtly dramatic style which is perhaps a bit too over-cooked for my taste. However the corps de ballet showed a solid base and I think the company strengths are definitely with the quality of some of their dancers. It would perhaps be good to see the company dance something with perhaps not so swinging a narrative to really concentrate on the dancers qualities.

<small>[ 17 February 2003, 02:14 AM: Message edited by: Joanne ]</small>

Tchaikovsky
By Judith Mackrell for The Guardian


Watching the Eifman Ballet's Tchaikovsky, you can easily imagine its subject feeling hounded in his grave. Aside from the casual mauling of his music (a tinny compilation of greatest hits), this portrayal of Tchaikovsky's traumatised sexual and creative life is as histrionic as anything Ken Russell fantasised in The Music Lovers. The composer is plagued by characters from his most famous ballet scores as he battles with his homosexuality and fights to preserve the integrity of his music. This Tchaikovsky, as danced by Konstantin Matulevski with a quivering lip and anguished gaze, is not the brilliant musician, but a character who is nine parts torment, one part genius.

Yet Boris Eifman's version of the composer's life does build its own peculiar, flamboyant logic. On the surface, his plot progresses straightforwardly through the emotional points in Tchaikovsky's life: his troubled dependence on his domineering patron Countess Von Meck, his even more troubled attempts at loving a woman, his struggle with depression and desire for death.

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Tchaikovsky
By Debra Craine for The Times


TWO famous Russians had the Boris Eifman treatment at Sadler’s Wells last week. The first was the ballerina Olga Spessivtseva, whose emotionally fraught life provided the inspiration for Eifman’s lurid ballet Red Giselle, which opened the company’s London season. The second was Tchaikovsky, whose emotionally fraught life provided the inspiration for the aptly titled Tchaikovsky, a colourful bio-ballet made in 1993, back when Russian contemporary dance was breaking free after years of restraint.

Like Red Giselle, Tchaikovsky is a showy, churning drama that sets out to explore the turbulent inner life of a character torn by conflicting desires — in this case, homosexuality. As the composer lies dying on a minimalist stage, his life is revealed in energetic flashbacks which mingle fact with fiction.

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Genius reduced to a self-loathing zombie
In The Daily Telegraph, Ismene Brown reviews Tchaikovsky performed by Eifman Ballet Theatre at Sadler's Wells.


With Tchaikovsky, Eifman Ballet Theatre, Russia's leading modern company, were treading on even thinner ice than with the previous offering, Red Giselle. Both productions waded unwisely into ballet-biography, a genre that has, in a fortnight, provided three outstanding contenders for Stinker of the Year. Bejart's Mother Teresa and the Children of the World was a dead-cert winner, until Red Giselle, Boris Eifman's coarsely miscalculated bio-ballet of the Diaghilev superstar Olga Spessivtseva. This made it clear that Eifman thinks like a tabloid headline-writer: "Gay boyfriend drove Bolshevik ballerina mad" summing it up.

But Tchaikovsky was in a class of its own. Any lingering doubts that Eifman is unmentionable anywhere near Kenneth MacMillan were put to flight in his 1993 fantasy portrait of another tortured genius, this one in a "gay, syphilitic schizophrenic shock".

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<small>[ 19 February 2003, 04:14 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Red Giselle
By Jenny Gilbert for The Independent on Sunday

To judge by the vast number of Swan Lakes touted to UK audiences by subsidy-bereft Russian companies, you'd believe Russia was fixated on its imperial, fairytale past. The arrival of the Eifman Ballet Theatre of St Petersburg last week goes some way to correcting that view. Former dissident Boris Eifman's neo-classical take on ballet is unmistakably Russian – big on bravura, big on Russian-historical themes – yet it has flung aside the shackles of the so-called St Petersburg style without apology.

The company has been going since 1977, but in the pre-Gorbachev years it only narrowly survived the authorities' disapproval (Eifman's choreography was "pornographic" they said).

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Put on the red light
By John Percival for The Independent

What an impossible task Boris Eifman has set himself and his dancers: to represent on stage the person whom many good judges swore to be the greatest of all 20th-century ballerinas. No, not Pavlova, Ulanova or Fonteyn; we are talking about Olga Spessivtseva, star of the Maryinsky Theatre, of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, of the Paris Opera and even of the first British Giselle. And what was so special about her? Just a technique so perfect, we are told, that other dancers were awed when they saw it, combined with great dramatic passion.

But what made Eifman take her for the subject of his Red Giselle was something besides, namely that she went mad and (unnecessarily, it seems) spent 22 years confined in hospital.

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Tchaikovsky
By David Dougill for The Sunday Times

The Eifman Ballet Theatre of St Petersburg closed its week with another of the choreographer Boris Eifman’s psychodramas, following the earlier Red Giselle. Tchaikovsky is about the emotional conflicts and torments of the composer’s life. He grapples with his Double (his dark side-cum-male lover), his wife, his patron, his ideal prince Carabosse, Rothbart, Drosselmeyer, the Queen of Spades, White Swans and Black Birds....

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