Reinventing Dance

Three men and two women simultaneously touch their ankles, pause for a moment and then start moving slowly.

Three freeze and two continue moving ?€” one puts her head to her stomach, the other bends into an arched tree. The music is barely audible, but the audience clearly hears the tender rustle of moving bodies.

This is a group called P.O.V.S. Tantsy, one of the oldest contemporary dance troupes in modern Russia, who are set to play at the TsEKh dance festival this week.

Being one of the oldest contemporary dance troupes in Russia still means having been around for less than 20 years. Although Russia is a country defined by its great dancers who breathed life back into classical ballet in the 19th century, the country has not made much of a mark on the world of contemporary dance. But interest is growing with 20 performances planned this week as part of the festival.

TsEKh is a playground for dancers where original, fresh ideas are more important than polished, perfectly choreographed performances. A number of the works are experiments that may or may not be repeated again. Unlike other dance festivals, TsEKh does not give out prizes, allowing participants to take chances.

"The interest in contemporary dance has grown exponentially in recent years," said Alexandra Konnikova, dancer and choreographer of Po.V.S. Tanze. "Young dancers are thirsty for new information. They call and come to classes, and they want to work in dance troupes and participate in festivals."

Modern dance emerged at the beginning of the 20th century as a reaction against classical ballet. Ballet's strictly-defined moves served as a catalyst as choreographers and ballerinas fought to create a new dance order.

American dancers such as Martha Graham and Isadora Duncan rebelled against the rigid rules of ballet dance techniques and costume, focusing instead on self-expression through a freer style of dance where emotions influenced a performer's movements.

Duncan greatly influenced modern dance in Russia. She was a grand, flamboyant figure and married poet Sergei Yesenin even though the two of them could not speak each other's languages, and she opened a dance school in Moscow in 1921.

Modern dance became all the rage in the fevered 1920s in Russia, with more than 300 studios in Moscow and personalities such as groundbreaking dancers and choreographers Michel Fokine and Vaslav Nijinsky. Duncan fit her philosophical view of dance into the excitement of the times, seeing it as an instrument to form a new man, one free from inhibitions and stereotypes.

She spoke of how dance was a natural and spiritual form known by the ancient Greeks but abandoned 2,000 years ago; she, in turn, danced barefoot and in a Greek tunic.

"The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche," she once announced grandly.

For her, the dancer was a superhuman who would not "believe in God if God did not dance."

Tsekh Festival

Another modern dance revolutionary, Martha Graham, put it more simply: "The body says what words cannot."

But modern dance ended like modern art in the Soviet Union, squashed and shut away from the other side of the Iron Curtain.

It took another 60 years before it was reborn in the late 1980s, the physical consequence of an impending revolution in Russia's political system.

Young, curious dancers formed clusters around the country, uniting into self-made labs where they explored new forms of movement. In contrast to most other innovations in cultural life, Moscow was not the center, with the first modern dance incubators set up in Vladivostok, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk and St. Petersburg.

In Novosibirsk, choreographer Leonid Jacobson set up the group Choreographic Miniatures, while Natalya Fiksel started a theater of modern dance that explored female sexuality and subconscious desires. The theater of plastic dance formed by Olga Bavdilovich in Vladivostok explored the energy of the subconscious and the libido. And Yekaterinburg saw "Provintsialniye Tantsy" formed by choreographer Tatyana Baganova and director Lev Shulman, in which performers did not speak, as well as Kipling, a group that became famous for its satirical and nostalgic references to life in the Soviet Union. Kipling is playing at this year's TsEKh, and Provintsialniye Tantsy continues to be an innovator in the Yekaterinburg scene.

Early dance troupes from St. Petersburg, Iguan and Drugoi Tanets, are still working today.

In Moscow, one of the explorers of modern dance was Alexander Pepelyayev, who formed the Kinetic theater. Po.V.S. Tanze was formed in 1997 by students of ballet-master Gennady Abramov.

Both of these groups will take part in the TsEKh Festival. Pepelyayev will present a new media dance piece called "Mukh-Zokotukh," where a computer program will copy the movements of a group of dancers turned insects. Po.V.S. Tanze, under the direction of choreographer Konnikova, will present "Probability Practice," the improvisational piece described before, in which an ending is not chosen until the very end.

Other performances worth seeing include "Huri-Huri" by the Yekaterinburg troupe Kipling, "Cinestetika" by 2005 Golden Mask winner Dina Husseyn and "Francheska D'Ofis" by St. Petersburg's Ed Physical theater.

Some of the biggest influences in the late '80s and '90s in Russia were European schools where contemporary dance had become part of a deep-rooted culture of dance.

In recent years, DV8 Physical Theatre from England, Sasha Waltz from Germany, the Ultima Vez Dance Company from Belgium, Mats Ek from Sweden and Steve Paxton, an experimental dancer and choreographer from Arizona have been huge influences on Russian dancing. Foreign dance teachers had impacts on the culture here as well ?€” for instance, teachers from the London Contemporary Dance School introduced Russian dancers to the professional techniques of modern dance developed by American dancers such as Graham.

Graham's impact on dance has been compared to that of Picasso on painting, but the Soviet years cut Russian dancers off from the rest of the world so that few professional dancers in Russia have had access to her techniques.

Nearly 20 years on, interest in contemporary dance is growing among young people, and professional dancers are no longer overly influenced by other schools, instead developing styles and concepts of their own.

Today, contemporary dance troupes use modern dance techniques but seek to go further, studying the relationships between the body and the mind.

"Contemporary dance has become very conceptual," said Ksenia Petrenko, a Chelyabinsk contemporary theater director and choreographer. "It is now a mixture of theater, music, philosophy, physical therapy. It goes so far as to sometimes get rid of movement itself."

Contemporary dance in Russia continues to evolve despite a lack of state support, common in other European countries, and the TsEKh festival shows how, from Moscow to Vladivostok, the contemporary dance movement is taking root as it once did nearly 90 years ago. And even without state financing, contemporary dancers are unlikely to go into another deep slumber.

TsEKh '08 runs from Dec. 10 to Dec. 16, with performances at Aktovy Zal (Project Fabrika), the Meyerhold Center, and Theater Center on Strastnoi. 221-07-57. www.tsekh.ru.