Hora

The programme Diaghilev. Short Forms is one of the key events of the festival cycle dedicated to modern dance. This is an experiment in which modern dance has met new academic music. The experiment resulted in six world premieres: specifically for the Diaghilev Festival, well-known and aspiring Russian choreographers created six small dance performances to the music of the musicAeterna and Dom Radio resident composers.

The participants of the programme are choreographers with already formed creative style, as well as those who are at the beginning of their creative path.
Nurbak Batulla is the winner of the 2018 Golden Mask Award. He is a graduate of the Kazan Choreographic College and the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts (Saint Petersburg), a resident of the Kazan theatre MOÑ.

Vladimir Varnava has been awarded the Golden Mask twice. He made his debut as a choreographer in 2011 and since then has been actively working with state ballet theatres, independent contemporary dance companies, drama theatres, and private theatre companies in Russia and abroad.
Evgeny Kalachev is an artist of the musicAeterna Dance. He began his career at the Samara 'Scream' Dance Theatre and the Yekaterinburg 'Provincial Dances' troupe, and has staged synthetic art works for independent performers.

Ksenia Mikheyeva is a two-time winner of the Golden Mask Award in the nomination 'Best Modern Dance Performance'. A graduate from the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet as a choreographer, she has been a mentor and choreographer at the Boris Eifman Dance Academy since 2016, and is the founder of her own dance company, the Ksenia Mikheyeva Project.

Maxim Petrov is the artistic director of the Ural Ballet (Yekaterinburg). He is the winner of the Golden Mask Award for the ballet Russian Dead Ends-II. From 2012 to 2023, he was a dancer at the Mariinsky Theatre, and began his career as a choreographer at the Mariinsky Theatre in 2014. He has staged ballet, opera and experimental performances in state theatres and independent companies in Russia and around the world.
Igor Firsov graduated from the Moscow Provincial College of Arts with a degree in Modern Dance, participated in the 'Dance on TNT Channel' show (season 7), performs in productions by Marsel and Maria Nuriyev, the Context. Diana Vishneva Festival troupe and others.

The choreographers were invited to familiarize themselves with the music archive, which contains recordings of works created just a year or two ago within the framework of a single aesthetic union, the musicAeterna residency system, where composers create music for common projects and form a single aesthetic field. Each of the choreographers picked one of the proposed compositions by Teodor Currentzis and the resident composers of the Dom Radio — Kirill Arkhipov, Andreas Moustoukis, Alexey Retinsky, and Victoria Kharkevich — and stage a dance miniature for the performers of their choice.

The programme Diaghilev. Short Forms sets a far-reaching goal — to find an ideal synthesis of the two art forms, in which modern dance and modern academic music have equal weight and mutually enrich each other, in which there is neither a dictate of musical form, nor an applied approach to sound. The programme is also meant to answer the question of how exactly the musicAeterna sound code affects the individual creative mannerisms of different choreographers. Can it become a common language that unites not only music, but also modern dance?

The French classic of the 20th century Francis Poulenc composed the opera for a solo performer La Voix humaine in 1958. It is based on a libretto by Jean Cocteau adapted from his 1928 play of the same name. Like the dramatic mono-piece, the opera, which allows for a wide variety of stage interpretations, has become a repertory hit both in Europe and Russia.

Andrey Kaydanovskiy, one of the most notable choreographers of the 40-year-old generation, decided to combine the depth of the human voice with the desperate truth of the human body in Poulenc's opera. Trained at the junction of the Russian and European theatrical and ballet traditions, he has been working as a choreographer for more than ten years. In his productions, the grotesque harmoniously combines with tenderness, the aesthetics of theatre with the dynamics of cinema, and an understanding of traditions with a consistent search for his own idiom.

The choreographer and the director recognized two sides of the same soul in two Saint Petersburg artists — singer Yulia Matochkina and dancer Daria Pavlenko. Both are stars of the first magnitude at the international stage, each with her own unique image. Yulia Matochkina is a soloist of the Mariinsky Theatre, winner of the XV Tchaikovsky International Competition (Casta Diva Award), guest soloist of the Metropolitan Opera, the Bolshoi Theatre of Russia, La Scala Theatre, the Bavarian Opera, etc. Daria Pavlenko is an Honoured Artist of Russia, prima ballerina of the Mariinsky Theatre (until 2018), multiple winner of the Golden Mask, Golden Spotlight, as well as other awards, and a guest soloist at the Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal. What unites the two artists is an absolute lack of acting fear, a talent for sizzling frankness on stage, and a desire to get to the core.

Andrey Kaydanovskiy called his version a 'choreographic opera.' He split the recitative monologue of a woman who says goodbye to her lover on the phone, like a telephone cable, along two lines: the inner voice is given to movement, the outer to singing. As the author of the idea explains, ‘We have two characters in front of us who actually become one person. It's just like in life: after a painful separation, your heart breaks apart and pushes you into the abyss, while your head tries to make you pull yourself together. We see two views on the same story of an abandoned woman. We are witnessing a struggle between the heart and the mind. The stage action develops as an independent line and gives additional meanings to the drama by Jean Cocteau and Francis Poulenc.’