This year’s Days of Dance begin with a premiere by the Polish National Ballet and end with a performance by the Boris Eifmana company.
This is already the sixth edition of the event, each attracting more and more viewers. Reserve dates from 15 to 23 November!
For starters, the Polish National Ballet will debut its triple bill titled 1914, comprising pieces by Kurt Joossa (The Green Table), Jiři Kylián (Soldier’s Mass) and Robert Bondara (Nevermore…?). The prodcution will be shown on 15, 16 and 18 November. On 21 November the Warsaw company will present another triple bill — Obsessions —bringing together choreographies by Krzysztof Pastor (Adagio & Scherzo and Moving Rooms) and Emil Wesołowski (Returning Waves).
But the festival’s highlights will undoubtedly be its guests. The ballet of the Grand Theatre in Poznań will present Cinderella on 20 November. We will see the popular ballet fairy tale set to Sergei Prokofiev’s music reworked by Canada’s Paul Chalmer, who used the classical technique to devise a show featuring a considerable dose of bitterness and dejection, and thus targeted rather at adults than children.
The audience will be treated to a completely different dancing style in Engagé & Rust (19 November), a collaboration of Elwira Piorun of Warsaw’s Zawirowania Theatre and Ido Tadmor, Israel’s leading dancer and choreographer. The two choreographies tell two tales of a mature couple’s relationship. The first was created by Tadmor, the other by Britain’s Rachel Erdos, who has been collaborating with Tadmor for a few years now. Engagé & Rust premiered last year in Tel Aviv.
The festival’s last guest does not need recommending. The Ballet Theatre of Boris Eifman of Saint Petersburg will show Beyond Sin. The production, although not new, has never before been staged in Poland.
‘Almost 20 years ago I put on The Brothers Karamazov,’ says Eifman. ‘The show was successful, also in Poland. Now, I’ve done new Brothers Karamazov, because the subject is still close to me, but I feel it needs a different rendition. I suspect that the audience needs it all the same.’
The new ballet version of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel will be shown on 22 and 23 November.
Jacek Marczyński