LIST.CO.UK/FESTIVAL DEBORAH COLKER FESTIVAL DANCE
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE Brazilian choreographer Deborah Colker is heading to Edinburgh with a Russian story. She tells Donald Hutera all about her journey
W hen you approach the latest dance production by trailblazing, Olivier Award-winning Brazilian choreographer Deborah Colker, please jettison clichés of samba, sun and surf. The small, blonde dynamo, 52 this year, is hugely popular in her native country while constantly cultivating an ever-widening international reputation.
In the past two decades she has created performances that feature a climbing wall and a giant wheel, or that easily referenced physics, n conceived and directed a piece for philosophy or fetishism. She even conceived and directed a piece for se for egg) Cirque du Soleil (OVO, Portuguese for egg) and managed to inject her own sunny yet volcanic personality into it.
Now, for the i rst time, Colker has tackled pre-existing source material. Tatyana, her Edinburgh is International Festival debut, r an adaptation of Russian author y Alexander Pushkin’s 19th-century . verse novel, Eugene Onegin. - Lodged at its heart is the head-over- l heels love an innocent country girl nt feels for a seli sh dandy, intelligent s and privileged but bored. He rejects d. her. Years later the tables are turned. ra With its amatory dreams, aura nd and of doomed nd and understanding ok superstition, Colker found the book e,’ irresistible. ‘It’s about love and life,’ lf- she says, speaking from her self- Rio titled company’s headquarters in Rio and de Janeiro, ‘about being young and om growing up by building values from gest your losses and choices.’ Her biggest n’s tackling Pushkin’s challenge acy writing was ‘to have the accuracy to respect, pursue and embrace romanticism of nature
in
everything I i nd in it’.
This may not have been as hard as it seems, given Colker’s Russian- Jewish heritage. ‘My four grandparents are Russian, so it wasn’t like going to another planet. I remember when I was little sitting on my grandpa’s lap, and he used to tell me stories by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Pushkin. I remember the feelings in them, all the fears and yearning.’ In researching and devising Tatyana, Colker made her company dive head-i rst into Eugene Onegin, its various incarnations in opera, ballet and i lm and the culturally l ourishing Russia of Pushkin’s era (a far cry
from today’s Pussy Riot versus Putin). The show’s score teems with music by the likes of Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Prokoi ev and especially Rachmaninov, supplemented by the work of American maverick Moondog, minimalist composer Terry Riley and Colker’s own long- time musical collaborator, Berna Ceppa.
Although inspired by all these inl uences, Colker chose to make a work that in no way would betray its historical or geographical origins. Tatyana, she insists, ‘is not Brazilian or Russian, nor from 2012 or 1836. The piec piece is timeless, but it comes from 1836. The my my heart and skin. It was a gift to be c be close to Russian art and yet have the the freedom to be here and now, con connecting myself to the Tatyana wh who lives inside me – a woman wh who builds her future and makes her her own choices’. W Working with her
regular de designer Gringo Cardia, Colker re responded to Pushkin using all he her senses. Passionate, poetic and pa partly danced on pointe, Tatyana is is a work of large-scale physical, v visual psychological im impressions. The major set- p piece is a vast, abstract tree both r reaching yet rooted, and sturdy e enough to be danced upon. and
Although
sprung framework, from a n narrative the p performance doesn’t adhere to an easily-grasped plot. There’s not just one Onegin and Tatyana, but four each in Act One, and double that number in a second act described as ‘pure feeling.’ atmosphere, pure Pushkin is onstage too and Pushkin is onstage too, and Colker herself. ‘I usually joke saying I’m the female Pushkin, or the Deborah who chose the book and interfered and identii ed with it and built this show, just as Pushkin built this story with its many creative layers.’
Clearly, Colker is smitten with her titular heroine. ‘I still want to talk to Pushkin, to call or send an email and ask why he named his book Eugene Onegin, and not after the character he builds with all his strength.’ Deborah Colker Dance Company: Tatyana, Edinburgh Playhouse, 473 2000, Sat 11–Tue 14 Aug, 7.30pm, £10–£30.
9–16 Aug 2012 THE LIST 61