If you’ve ever been on a package holiday, you’ll
know that very many of them offer extra excursions to an “Egyptian
evening”, a “Moroccan evening”, a “Turkish
evening”, or whatever, and that, along with the snake charmers,
galloping desert horsemen and the like, you’ll usually
see some rather bored looking youngsters dressed up in old-fashioned
clothes and gamely going through the paces of their traditional
native folk dances.
The whole thing can be quite entertaining, especially if you’ve
opted for the deal that includes unlimited drinks with your meal,
but thankfully it doesn’t usually go on for too long.
This DVD, based around a somewhat dated documentary showcasing
the work of Igor Moiseyev, the founder of the Folk Dance Ensemble
of the Soviet Union, offers rather a lot more, however. Its spoken
commentary lays its cards boldly on the table:
“... an avid collector of folk dances, a brilliant director
and dramatist and one of the most outstanding choreographers
in the history of the art ... In Moiseyev’s choreography,
each nation speaks its own language, each one has its own rhythm,
plasticity and manner, its own inimitable national flavour. We
don’t see a mere repetition of the folk dance but rather
a magical transformation of its best elements. As great poets
transformed folk tales, Moiseyev returns the dance in its perfected
form to the people...” [From the commentary accompanying
the documentary film].
Well, yes ... but, one might ask, isn’t the whole idea
of “perfecting” traditional folk dances something
that rather defeats the whole object of attempting to preserve
them in the first place?
Later in this film, Moiseyev himself attempts to explain his
revisionist philosophy:
“... I am convinced that it
is not enough simply to love folklore or just enjoy it ... It’s
not enough to study it or popularize it. Folklore must continue
to evolve. If we only fixate on historically based folklore,
we’ll be buried in the past and we’ll become a museum.
Folklore is a continuous process, like a stream of water that
is ever changing; something dies and something is born. So it
is necessary to find something in the life of the people that
is contemporary and topical.”
What, one might legitimately ask, is so very wrong with museums?
But it is a question that is never answered here. Rather, it
is taken for granted that Moiseyev’s approach is the most
appropriate way in which to present folk dances to modern audiences.
In fact, not many questions are answered here at all; mind you,
the old Brezhnev-era Soviet Union wasn’t really a great
place to
ask questions in the first place. It’s
all really just an opportunity to see some colourful, lively
and quite enjoyable performances from some clearly very talented
dancers, though whether the choreography - mixing as it does
such disparate elements as folk dance, Busby Berkeley and Fred
Astaire - quite justifies the “outstanding” tag is
another matter entirely.
An excerpt from
Russian suite successfully establishes
a few ground rules. Given that an important function of village
folk dancing would probably have been to give young people the
opportunity to get to know each other, the men are generally
athletic show-offs while the women tend to be flirtatious yet
coy. That general impression is confirmed by a
Bashkirian
dance (for seven women) and a
Kalmuk dance (three
young men).
Apart from those, though, Moiseyev soon takes us away from the
Russian peasant village. A regular theme is his fondness for
music conveying something of the hot Mediterranean lands.
Sicilian
tarantella features an exciting, rhythmic “village
dance”, with a colourful pantomime horse providing a welcome
piece of stagecraft. All the other dances we see here feature
no scenery or extra props at all.
Aragon jota - to an
arrangement of Glinka’s familiar score - has 15 men and
15 women showing off some intricate footwork amid swirling dresses
and clicking castanets. The Latin theme is maintained with the
rather over-long
Gaucho (
Dance of the Argentine cowboys)
in
which three male soloists strut their macho stuff … though
how many cowboys, one wonders, ever wore frilly white lace around
their knees? Thereafter a
Gypsy dance opens appropriately
with a typically sensuous
zigeuner atmosphere but soon
degenerates into music that might be appropriate to the athleticism
on stage but that has abandoned altogether any claim to gypsy-ness.
The rest of the dances in the main documentary film are a very
mixed bunch. The male and female dancers in
At the ice rink -
set to the music of Johann Strauss rather than Waldteufel as
one might have guessed - are supposedly trying to demonstrate
that sport is a modern, urban and collective form of folk activity
(hmmm...);
Naval suite, perhaps the most obvious attractive
crowd pleaser here, sees a stage full of naval ratings mugging
away to all those familiar clichéd mariners’ stances
and gestures while giving their all to Gliere’s well-known
Sailors’ Dance from
The
Red Poppy; while
Celebration of Labour is a Stalinist/Maoist
fantasy that rather reminded me of the National Ballet of China’s
famous production
The red detachment of women. Featuring
massed ranks of dungaree-ed factory workers, agricultural labourers,
growing crops (I think!) and jolly peasants, not to mention a
couple of Soviet astronauts and what I would swear were - but
probably weren’t - a gaggle of bewigged High Court judges,
it is completely mad - and made even more so by a final choral
blast of something trying desperately to sound like the
Internationale!
After the documentary, we are offered three extracts from what
appears to have been a live 1982 theatrical performance, complete
with audience. A short
Belarussian folk dance for women
dressed rather like
matryoshka - those peasant dolls that
fit one inside the other - is followed by a brief
Tartar dance (two
men and one woman) and then yet another version of our
Sicilian
tarantella, complete with the
coup de théâtre pantomime
horse that was obviously thought so effective that this time
it gets to come on stage
twice.
You will no doubt recall Moiseyev’s assertion that, in
order to maintain folk dance as a living art, “it is necessary
to find something in the life of the people that is contemporary
and topical”. Well, he certainly put that into vivid effect
in the programme’s very last item - a 1964 piece - in very
grainy black and white and looking like it was originally probably
a TV item - called
Viva Cuba! Clearly inspired by the
Cuban missile crisis of 1962, this is an utterly camp, completely
over the top collector’s item: it is, indeed, billed on
the DVD’s back cover as hitherto “rare” - and
I am not in the slightest bit surprised. Mixing into the score
some clichéd Latin American rhythms with clear musical
hints of our old friend the
Sicilian tarantella, Moiseyev
fills the massive stage with a prancing mixture of boys and girls
who look like they’d been auditioning for parts as Sharks
and Jets in
West Side Story, machine-gun toting women
freedom fighters and at least half a dozen lookalikes of Fidel
Castro himself. Shamefully, there is also an actress in caricatured
blackface - but we in the UK, at least, can hardly tut-tut, given
that one of the most popular programmes on BBC television at
the time was
The Black and White Minstrel Show.
I see that the front covers of two earlier volumes in this series
bore the slogan
The astonishing Moiseyev Dance Company.
I doubt very much whether anyone who watches this remarkable
DVD will have any doubt that it was, indeed, a most astonishing
company - but perhaps not necessarily only in the way that production
company VAI meant in that rather ambiguous description.
Rob Maynard
VAI 4462 
[78:00] 
