Let’s follow the best

Shekera’s shows are always sold out and ballet dancers compete for the honor of playing in them. As is tradition, the festival opened on March 30, the master’s birthday (Shekera staged 19 ballets and dances in 11 operas). The ballets that now adorn the National Opera House playbill include the lyrical Swan Lake, the philosophical parable The Legend about Love, the poetic and dramatic Romeo and Juliette, the heroic and epic Spartacus, the passionately exquisite Bolero and others. The choreographer had a talent for creating large shows, where the so-called “extras” were never just a crowd. He entrusted only the best of the best to play the solos — those who could not just demonstrate virtuosic dancing technique, but also dramatic art when rendering the people’s finest feelings. That’s why his shows don’t lose their appeal with time and continue to excite audiences.

Several generations of dancers and choreographers have undergone Shekera’s master class and his creative work glorified our country and the Ukrainian ballet school. He’s shared the pedestal with such masters as Marius Petipa, George Balanchine, Maurice Bejart and Yury Gri-gorovych; Shekera found his own expressive dancing “language” through following the classical traditions. For many years he was the main choreographer of the Kyiv Taras Shevchenko Opera and Ballet Theater (now the National Ukrainian Opera House) and artists would polish their skills in his performances both in Ukraine and abroad, notably in Croatia, Turkey and Macedonia.

Owing to the contribution of Shekera’s widow, the former brilliant ballerina Eleonora Stebliak, Shekera’s performances continue to live on the Kyiv stage. This year the Shekera Prize was awarded to the National Opera House soloist Olha Holytsia. For five years she has shown the talent and skill necessary to master tough solos such as Lileia from Kostiantyn Dankevych’s ballet of the same name, Snow White from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Bohdan Pavlovsky, Swanilda from Coppelia by Leo Delibes, Juliette in Romeo and Juliette by Sergey Prokofiev, Phrygia in Spartacus by Aram Khachaturian and solos in Don Quixote, and La Bayadere by Ludwig Minkus, Corsair by Adolphe Adam and The Swan Lake by Pyotr Tchaikovsky. She is the laureate of the international ballet contests “The Youth of Ballet” (2001, first prize), “Artek” (2002), “Serge Lifar” (Kyiv, 2004, first prize), and “Agrippina Vaganova” (St. Petersburg, 2006, third prize).

Today the National Opera House ballet troupe is headed by Shekera’s pupil Viktor Yaremenko, who follows his mentor’s traditions. The festival gives the audience an opportunity to meet the brilliant masters of the dance Olena Filipieva, Olha Holytsia, Kostiantyn Pozharnytsky, Ihor Bulynovych, Andrii Hura and others.

“Shekera enriched the ballet repertoire with the works of Ukrainian composers (Dankevych, Kyreiko, Dychko, Hubarenko, Skoryk and Stankovych); he staged performances on folk themes that he had fallen in love with in Lviv when he worked as a choreographer at the Lviv Opera and Ballet Theater in 1964-66. Seven out of nineteen shows Anatolii Shekera staged in Kyiv were created to the music of modern Ukrainian composers,” emphasizes Vasyl Turkevych, the author of the monograph Anatolii Shekera, the Great Ukrainian Choreographer. “Is there another choreographer in Ukraine who would have done so much for national choreography? I will remind you that for his debut in Kyiv in 1966 he chose The Legend about Love by Arif Melikov. It’s one of the most complicated philosophical and dramatic works. Shekera’s performance went far beyond the li-mits of the so-called ‘eternal triangle.’ The choreographer saw the ballet’s quintessence not in the romance of the great and unquenchable love and tragic relations between Shireen, Mekhmene-banu and Ferkhad, but in depicting the highest ideal — fighting for freedom. Anatolii Shekera addressed complicated universal and philosophical problems through dance.” (Last year Shekera’s widow revived this ballet wonder for his 75th anniversary. — Author.)

Shekera’s ballets spell drama with their characters, remarks, marginalia and what Stanislavsky called “the objective.” It is not about having a nice show, but about penetrating into the hero’s world, understanding his psychological state. Shekera always persistently searched his own stylistic of the choreographic score, in which the dances would organically embody the music, would be rich, would shape the permanent movement and natural transition from one position to another, and would sound polyphonically. He achieved this best in his performance of The Stone Master by Vitalii Hubarenko. Shekera experimented a lot: he created new paths enriching the choreographic palette of expressive tools and bravely applied them to not just modern but classical ballets as well.

The performances he staged differed a lot in their content and style. Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliette was symbolic amidst the master’s creative work. Proceeding from musical dramaturgy, the director not only outlines the intimacy and purity of the cha-racters’ feelings but also immerses the audience in the tragic essence of Shakespeare’s play. In this ballet Shekera looked first of all for the unity of the tragic and the poetic, that life-asserting ideal that would defeat the small and trivial. He whets the feelings and conflicts to an extreme, giving the audience the possibility not only to see but to go through the tragedy and feel the pain of a bare nerve. Romeo and Juliette was a ballet of genuine emotion, deep conflict and dynamism. Created in 1971, it has adorned the Kyiv stage till now (Shekera received the UNESCO medal for it).

Almost all of the choreographer’s performances are marked by the dynamism and expression of stage action, kaleidoscopic at times, creating a situational sketch of historical and temporal space (ex: the proscenium in Spartacus by Khachaturian giving a bright vision of the aggressive Roman times) with a development to further the polyphonic filling of the performance’s score.

By the way, the composer attended the premiere and called the Kyiv version the best. Spartacus became one of the deepest and most interesting choreographic interpretations of Khachaturian’s score. The dance and the music merged into an integral polyphonic show, where each movement, pas and mise-en-scene were filled with a corresponding musical rhythm and feeling. Spartacus is a multi-aspect heroic and tragic dancing poem.

Shekera said in one of his interviews: “The art of choreography is versatile. I’m sure that ballet can do anything! Yet another thing matters: what is its destiny? The ballet’s nature is divine. It has to bring beauty back to the people and not glorify petty reflection. Ballet has to express the problem of the ideal. Until I head this team I won’t allow the erosion of our art on the Kyiv stage and I won’t let the high aesthetic of academic choreography be squandered on modern aggressive plastique. Another thing is that ballet has to develop. I concede that modern dance will serve the classical one, but never vice versa.”

Shekera dreamed of staging the philosophical and epic ballet The Lost Paradise, he understood the text, watched the modern composers that could realize his idea in the score. Unfortunately, his serious illness and death didn’t give him the possibility to realize his idea… The forty years that Shekera devoted to his creative work weren’t easy and happy (the folk opera The Fern Blossom by Yevhen Stankovych was banned by party bureaucrats and the composer and choreographer were labeled “nationalists” for many years). However, Shekera was finally acknowledged and awarded with titles, prizes and medals. He was the first choreographer to be awarded the Shevchenko Prize! Unfortunately, the great choreographer received the highest art award of our country that he served with his heart and his talent only two weeks before his death… Probably, it’s high time to hold not only a ballet festival, but to organize a Choreographers Contest named after Shekera!

“Modern Ukrainian ballet and its brightest achievements on the crossroads of two centuries and millennia are undoubtedly associated with Anatolii Shekera’s creative work — he started its most complicated contemporary display, the large polyphonic and versatile performance, psychologically oriented toward inner dramaturgy. It became the dominant of the Kyiv ballet stage,” emphasizes Turkevych. “Anatolii Shekera’s performances reflected the level of the National Opera House ballet troupe. Several generations of prominent masters of the Kyiv stage realized their creative potential in Shekera’s shows, as did those who started their creative work after the famed choreographer passed away in 2000… Time inexorably alienates us from Anatolii Shekera, whose name is now part of the history of Ukrainian culture.”

At the gala concert on May 27 the audience will be shown a short video with Anatolii Shekera (fragments of rehearsals and interviews with the master, filmed in different years), then the premieres of the troupe. The young artists will perform fragments of the ballet Spartacus, the Cuman dances from the opera Prince Igor, About Love (to the music of Krylatov) and Bolero from Shekera’s heritage. Vadym Fedotov (who danced in all of Shekera’s performances and considers himself his pupil) who works in the US, will present the modern performance My Giselle (the main part to be performed by the Kyiv premiere Olena Filipieva), and others. Today the master lives in his ballets, in our me-mory and his pupils that continue to promote his cause and can say anything through choreography!