Yulia Yurchak | Nacho Duato "In The Forest"

Stylistic features of the production, definition of musical poetics in choreography
Let us consider the main vectors of development of modern ballet, as well as the types of relationships between music and choreography and genre varieties, using the example of the ballet by Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato, “Na Floresta” (“In the Forest”), namely its 2012 production at the Mikhailovsky Theater. This production is especially notable in that the choreographer worked with dancers educated in the system of strict academic choreography. In the process of analysis, we will also provide feedback from the dancers themselves about their experience of restructuring to a different type of dance thinking, different from academic ballet. Nacho Duato was born in Valencia, Spain. He studied with two reformers of the ballet genre – Maurice Béjart and William Forsythe. One of the most promising choreographers of our time, he is predicted to become the Marius Petipa of the 21st century. He signed his first professional contract in Stockholm in 1980 with the Kullberg Ballet, and a year later, choreographer Jiri Kylian invited him to the famous Netherlands Dance Theater (NDT). In 1988, Duato, along with Jiří Kylián and Hans van Manen, became the permanent choreographer of the Netherlands Dance Theater. The world premiere of the ballet "Na Floresta" took place in 1990 in The Hague. This choreographic composition, which celebrates the beauty of the Amazon rainforest, was incredibly successful and is still part of the repertoire of the world's leading theaters. "Na Floresta" is a short one-act plotless ballet, only 20 minutes long. This work, for all its novelty, remains quite close to the usual classical technique, although it deviates from its canons. The ballet contains many complex images, to which, according to Duato, there is only one key - music. It is in this production (as in other ballets by Duato) that the main factor is both the character, mood, which dictate the form and structure of the ballet.
“It is very musical, it needs some small accents,” says Irina Perren, a ballerina of the Mikhailovsky Theatre, about the work on the ballet production.“My dance comes from music. I live by music, and my inspiration comes from music”, says Duato himself about his approach to choreography.The ballet “Na Floresta” is dedicated to the largest forest on the planet – the Amazon rainforest. This dedication can really be read between the lines of this beautiful production. But “In the Forest” is not a treatise on animals, plants, and insects that need to be protected from human expansion, although it was the idea of saving the rainforest that inspired the young choreographer in 1990. A resident of big cities, Duato hides from urbanism in dance, which makes a person remember something important. For example, the inner fire that ignites a person when he touches the incomprehensibly beautiful elements of nature.A velvety low voice, accompanied by music, sings of the moon, trees, and birds: Duato took the music of the Brazilian composer Villa-Lobos as the basis for the dance embroidery. Interestingly, this is one of the few ballets that uses vocal music; that is, the choreographic and musical semantic line is supplemented by the content that is directly carried by the verbal text. To the sound of the piano and the forest sounds superimposed on the music, a ballet book of the jungle unfolds. The characters, sinking to the ground, stretch their whole bodies upwards, towards the sun, or rush towards each other, like hummingbirds to a flower. Their dance is a reaction to the intoxicating, spicy aroma of the tropical forest, which makes one dizzy. The movements are flexible, like wooden vines, and lightning-fast, like a leopard's leap, limbs open like orchid petals, and arms cross over the head like deer antlers. For the inhabitants of this space, agility and strength, the body's ability to spontaneously change in space, are the key to survival. At the same time, there are no specific messages and precisely presented stories in the ballet. Only an aura through which the audience feels the pulse of a huge natural organism.
Nacho Duato answers the question of why he stages plotless ballets – and pronounces the word “poetry”. In this regard, Nacho Duato continues the creative trend of his teacher and colleague, Jiří Kylián – a choreographer-philosopher, who was more interested in exploring the depths of human nature than the physical capabilities of the body, and who became known for his phenomenal musicality. “He transforms metaphors into movements. Kylian hears music and sees movements” – this is how the famous dancer Rudolf Nureyev spoke about the choreographer.In the context of comparing the art of dance with poetry, which Nacho Duato himself gives, we cannot help but turn to such a concept as “poetics”, which is most appropriate when applied to ballet. Let us try to consider the features of poetic language and draw some parallels with musical and choreographic language.One of the main definitions of poetics, as a branch of science, is the set of artistic, aesthetic, and stylistic qualities that determine the originality of a particular phenomenon of literature (less often cinema, theater), its internal structure, a specific system of its components, and its interconnection. The poetics of a work of art is a sign of its integrity and literary significance. Poetics is a combination of expressive means that makes a work of art harmonious and makes one realize the author's world.The basis of poetics is poetic language, which is a functional system. Its role is determined not so much by communicative tasks as by aesthetic ones, associated, first of all, with the sensual, expressive, associative perception of reality and the reflection of its imagery. Poetic language receives hidden knowledge about the world contained in language. This creates a special world called the world of poetry. This world of poetry penetrates works of art with the help of poetic vocabulary.Here it is worth referring to the list of the most used artistic expressive means of the poetic dictionary, which, as we have already noted, penetrates from the literary sphere into the musical, as well as into the dance sphere (it is enough to recall that many terms of the lexical dictionary, such as foot, meter, rhythm, stanza, motif, inversion, ellipsis, have exact analogues or are simply actively used in music theory and musicology). At the same time, many poetic forms became the basis for the formation of musical forms, both vocal and later instrumental (canzona, sonnet, tercet, rondo, etc.).
In our analysis, we will turn to general poetics, or, as it is also called, theoretical, systematic, “macropoetics”, as well as private poetics – “micropoetics”.General poetics, in turn, is divided into three branches that study, respectively, the sound, verbal, and general structure of the text. The goal of general poetics is to compile a complete systematized catalog of techniques covering all three areas. In the sound order of a work, phonics and rhythm are studied, and in the case of a poem, metrics and stanzas are also studied. In the verbal order, the features of vocabulary, morphology, and syntax are studied; the corresponding area is called stylistics. The features of vocabulary and syntax have long been studied by poetics and rhetoric, where they were taken into account as figures of speech; the features of morphology have become a subject of consideration in poetics only recently. In the figurative order of a work, images (characters and objects), motives (actions and deeds), plots (connected sets of actions) are studied; this area is called "topic" (traditional name), theme, or poetics in the narrow sense of the word.Part of poetics deals with the description of a literary work in all the aspects listed above, which allows you to create a "model" - an individual system of aesthetically valid properties of production. The main problem of private poetics is composition, that is, the mutual correlation of all aesthetically important elements of a work (phonic, metrical, stylistic, figurative-plot, and general composition, uniting them) in their functional reciprocity with the artistic whole. Here there is a significant difference between small and large literary form: in small (for example, in a proverb) the number of connections between elements, although large, is not inexhaustible, and the role of each in the system of the whole can be shown in many ways; in large form this is impossible, and, therefore, part of the internal connections remains unaccounted for as aesthetically imperceptible (for example, connections between phonics and plot). It should be remembered that some connections are relevant at the first reading of the text (when the expectation of reading is not yet oriented) and are rejected at the second reading, while others, on the contrary. The final concepts to which all means of expressiveness can be reduced during analysis are the "image of the world" (with its main characteristics, artistic time, and artistic space) and the "image of the game", the interaction of which is represented by the "point of view", which determines everything important in the structure of production.As in poetic language, musical language contains encrypted meanings that are created with the help of a special vocabulary. The list of artistic means of expression here is very similar to the means used in literature.
Musical vocabulary, like the professional vocabulary of any branch of human knowledge, is an organic part of the general literary language and is located on the border of two semiotic systems - language and music. The categories "musical language (language)" and "musical speech (speech)" have long and firmly entered the lexicon of scientific research and educational and methodological literature (B.L. Yavorsky, G.A. Orlov, V.V. Medushevsky, M.Sh. Bonfeld, V.M. Kholopova, etc.). In musicology, the categories of language and speech are considered in connection with aspects of musical content, musical thinking, and artistic text.Introduced by B.V. Asafiev in domestic musicology, the category of "musical intonation" allows the formation of a methodological basis for considering music as language and speech. Intonations can be perceived as carriers of meaningful information, in a certain sense, signs. The experience accumulated by musicologists over several centuries of systematizing the regularities of the technique of musical composition allowed us to imagine these intonation signs ordered in a certain way. Thus, music appears as a full-fledged language that comes to life in musical and speech activity. Most researchers who touch on the problems of musical language and musical speech not only consider music as a semiotic system similar to language, but also perceive units of this language as similar to words, as "musical lexemes" (the term of M.G. Aranovsky, also used by V.M. Kholopova).
Musical language, in turn, influences choreographic language, because we note that the evolution of dance plasticity occurred simultaneously with the revolution of musical style. In this regard, we will try to consider the lexical relationships of the language of music and dance. At the same time, musical-choreographic movement will be interpreted as the main unit of lexical synthesis of choreography and music.Music in choreographic art is not a background, but a figurative content goal for the implementation of various artistic tasks. Music is a kind of perfect artistic embodiment of the temporal principle. And the musical content of choreography cannot be considered outside the unity of temporal and spatial. It is the synthesis of these dimensions that constitutes the genesis of choreographic art. Dance is aimed at spatial and, we emphasize, visual artistic perception of various images; it embodies the poetics of fine and plastic arts, from painting to sculpture. Any spatial art is perceived as a hierarchy of regular spatial relations. Choreography reveals, in its spatial addition, features of architecture, sculpture, and painting.Plastic transformation of a musical text requires the choreographer to thoroughly decipher all the components of the musical fabric. All the most important means of musical expressiveness, the organic combination of which is the essence of a musical style, find their semantic alter ego in the means of choreography. The ability to transform all the components of musical language into visual images of artistic movement is what can be called the gift of plastic decoding of a musical and artistic text.Being comprehended by means of choreography, the means of musical expressiveness appear in a complex metaphorical transformation of sound images into plastic ones; at the same time, the artistic quality of the plastic embodiment of music is manifested in the exact and multidimensional stylistic correspondence to the movement poetics of music and choreography.
Modern choreographic interpretation of music of any era, organically included in the context of the talented conceptual ideas of the ballet master, gives an unlimited expansion of plastic possibilities. From this point of view, the choreographer can afford the utmost freedom of plastic comprehension of music. Considering movement as a kind of phenomenological, binding element in musical and choreographic art, one cannot forget that in its ideal expression, the plastic fixation of music in choreography is not so much a formal, structural, and technological mechanism as a disclosure of its figurative and poetic essence. At the same time, a kind of synthesis is not excluded, where the interacting elements of music and choreography may initially appear polar. Thus, the independence of the processes of compositional construction in music and dance, in the synthesis of musical form and choreographic architectonics, gives rise to a kind of additional dimension, which can be called musical and plastic dramaturgy.Choreographic interpretation of music is a complex mixture of figurative and motoric foreign speech; the main means of its embodiment is metaphor. The plastic embodiment of music is based on the organic correlation of musical and choreographic intonation. At the same time, the melodic-intonational structure of music mainly finds its artistic-plastic reflection in the contour-graphic image of choreographic movement. The harmonious language of music is reflected in the tectonics of choreographic development at the level of logical structuring of musical and choreographic material. The plastic multidimensionality of dance is based on the reflection of the polyphonic composition of music. Choreographic polyphony is the linear multi-componentiality of the choreographic text in a musical and choreographic performance. The musical poetics of choreography is based on the figurative-plastic decoding and choreographic transformation in the process of spatial-temporal deployment of all structural elements of musical language, and most importantly, the organic fusion of these elements, which determines the lexical unity and integrity of stage solutions in musical-choreographic theater.
Basic compositional principles of ballet, structure, and analysisThe task of a modern choreographer is to express an idea, the character of a character, and a meaningful image through the author's gesture. And this principle is very clearly manifested in Duato's choreographic approach. He finds for each image his own characteristic set of gestures - intonations, that is, he creates his own unique choreographic vocabulary. Nacho Duato stands out among modern choreographers primarily for his original style, closely connected with his homeland - Spain. Already from the staging of Duato's first ballet number ("The Walled Garden" in 1983), critics recorded the moment of the birth of a new choreographer with an original style. They were struck not by the plastic drawing itself (the choreography is in many ways secondary, similar to Mats Ek and Jiri Kylian, from whom Duato studied), but by its fusion with Spanish music and folklore. Duato then used songs from the disc “Jardi Tancat” by the popular performer María del Mar Bonet, who translated poems by Catalan poets into music. Multiple recordings of the production are posted on the Internet, and Duato has nothing against it. It is a rare case when a choreographer from their first work can be said to have taken place in the profession. This work has a non-childish handwriting; it has everything that defines the style of the early Duato – folkloric melodiousness, the invisible presence of nature, the absence of tension and aggression in the dance itself, the exact coincidence of the emotion of the word, the poem, and the emotion of movement, and some unusual smoothing of the angles of the rhythm.
Duato is confident in the need to create a direction of dance that could be identified as very modern and, most importantly, purely Spanish.Here, drawing parallels, we see a completely logical justification for why the Spanish choreographer turned to the work of the Brazilian composer when choosing music for the ballet. Comparing the role of Duato in the ballet and the role of Vila-Lobos in the music, we cannot help but note the obvious similarity in their styles, both of which rely on the folklore of their homeland, but harmoniously combine it with academic trends in art.But what is noteworthy, the choreographer chose not the original version of Villa-Lobos's music, but the arrangement of the modern Brazilian composer, Wagner Tiso, known primarily as a film composer, who created a translation of the symphonic suite for piano, cello, and voice (countertenor).In 1987, Wagner Tiso, in collaboration with Brazilian pop singer Nei Matogrosso, inspired by (or based on) Villa-Lobos's work, released the disc "A Floresta do Amazonas" ("In the Amazon Forest"), performed classically, but with added melodies. However, some numbers remained almost unchanged (although now sounded in a male performance), for example, "Melodia Sentimental" and "Canção do Amor".
The performer - Nei Matogrosso, being a pop singer, is as close as possible to Brazilian folk music, to the folk singing tradition, hence the characteristic chest timbre of the voice, a peculiar manner of performance, with a slight hoarseness, which gives the musical transcription some fantasticness, and works dedicated to one of the most mysterious places on planet Earth.One of the most famous Latin American composers, Villa-Lobos, became famous for the synthesis of stylistic features of Brazilian folk and European academic music.In his work, there is a contamination of different musical styles and layers.E. Vila-Lobos is a marginal composer, located on the border of different musical cultures: traditional European, Brazilian folklore, impressionism, and avant-garde movements in 20th-century music. Music often has an applied function; these are both dance and song genres.In his symphonic suite "A Floresta do Amazonas", we can trace a clear combination of academicism and folk tradition. Moreover, the academic beginning is more clearly expressed in instrumental numbers (although they are saturated with typically Brazilian folk rhythms), and in vocal numbers, the folk, sometimes even pop, beginning prevails.
Of the signs of the folk tradition, one can, of course, first of all single out the composer's modal thinking in terms of harmonies. Rhythms typical of Brazilian folk music and intonations characteristic of folk vocal genres are also used; here, we mean primarily urban folklore. Many melodies are close to popular songs, but at the same time, they can be saturated with impressionistic harmonies. The combination of impressionistic technique with a national basis is generally characteristic of Villa-Lobos. His interpretation of dissonance not as a tension that requires immediate resolution, not as a negative factor, but as a technique that adds decorative color to the harmony originates from Impressionism. A characteristic reliance on sound, sonority.The creation of “Floresta do Amazonas” coincided with the moment when Vila-Lobos signed a contract to compose the music for the film Green Mansions, based on the novel of the same name by William Henry Hudson, which was planned for release by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Having no idea what the rules were for composing music for motion pictures, Villa-Lobos created his work in the form of a huge symphonic score. He based it solely on the script (written by Dorothy Kingsley), without any idea of what the film would look like; perhaps he thought that composing a soundtrack was similar to composing a ballet score (this moment seems to have influenced the character of the music, which turned out to be extremely dance-like, or, to use ballet terminology, "dansante").
Although the composer was in the late stages of the illness that would eventually lead to his death, in 1959, Vila-Lobos was delighted with the project he was offered and soon set off for Hollywood with the completed score, arriving just as the film's first scenes were being shot. But he failed to take into account that the soundtrack had to be in harmony with the action in the frame. When asked what would happen if his music did not fit the film, his answer was simple: in that case, they would have to adapt the film to the music. Eventually, MGM gave Villa-Lobos' original score to its in-house composer, Bronislav Kaper, who was an expert in writing film scores and had a wealth of previous soundtracks. Kaper extracted several themes from the original work, reharmonized and arranged them, thus creating a practically new work. For Villa-Lobos, who was already a world-famous figure, this was a personal insult, and he was deeply disappointed. However, being a practical and resourceful man, he decided to salvage the parts of his work that MGM had not used, adding some scenes to the original music and reworking other parts. He also commissioned his friend, the poet Doria Vasconcelos, to write the poetic lyrics for four songs that later became famous: Veleiros ("Sailing Ships"), "Cair da Tarde" ("Twilight"), "Canção do Amor" ("Song of Love"), and "Melodia Sentimental" ("Sentimental Melody"). Thus, he wrote an orchestral poem (or suite, but given its structural features, we can indeed note the proximity to the poetic genre) for soprano, male choir, and symphony orchestra, to which he gave the title "Floresta do Amazonas", a work consisting of 21 movements with an overture and an epilogue. Here, it is worth referring to the plot of Hudson's book, which became the basis for the film, as well as to the biography of the writer himself, as a source of ideas and images that formed the basis of Villa-Lobos's music and were reflected in the choreography of the ballet "In the Forest".William Henry Hudson, also known as Enrique Guillermo Hudson (1841-1922), was born in Argentina to American settlers from England and Ireland. As we can see, the same pattern is reflected here as in the fate of Villa-Lobos and Nacho Duato - the junction of two cultures, European and American. In addition to his writing, Hudson was a naturalist and ornithologist, studying the Argentine flora and fauna and publishing his scientific research in naturalistic journals. His most famous novel, Green Estates, is often called the "novel of the rainforest", because it embodies all the writer's knowledge of the nature of those places, which he had studied since his youth.The book tells the love story of a man from the “civilized” world – the traveler-naturalist Abel, who became disillusioned with life and decided to spend the rest of his days in a remote native village in the tropical forests of Guyana, and the mysterious girl Rima, a savage from a tribe lost in the jungle, who can speak the language of birds and animals. The story ends tragically – the child of nature dies as a result of the prejudices of the hostile “civilized” world (thus, we can trace the line of destruction of nature in Hudson’s novel and in Duato’s ballet, originally dedicated to the preservation of the mercilessly destroyed Amazon forests).
The novel reflects philosophical ideas close to Hudson's, in particular, the main female character of the book, the savage Rima, illustrates the "natural man", a philosophical idea put forward by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others, that one who grows up and is raised far from corrupting civilization will be naturally pure of heart according to his environment. Tarzan, raised by apes, and Mowgli, raised by wolves, are literary relatives of Rima (as we can see, both authors of these literary works lived in approximately the same era, one slightly earlier, the other slightly later than Hudson, precisely during the period when Europeans were actively colonizing distant countries, this topic turned out to be extremely relevant).The title of the book could, according to some assumptions, have come from the biblical quote “In my Father’s house are many mansions” (John 14:2), meaning that the virgin forest is a natural and sacred cathedral. And it is this idea of the forest as a single living organism and a mysterious abode of some natural purity, spirituality, and even sacredness that is embodied in the music of Vila-Lobos, and then reflected by means of dance in the ballet Duato.
Here is what the Brazilian writer Milton Hatum says about the imagery of Villa-Lobos’ music:“The surprisingly expressive and lyrical Sentimental Melody achieves extraordinary beauty in the voice of the solo soprano. The male choir and the sounds of the forest are no less attractive. Overall, the complexity and melodic and rhythmic diversity of this suite show another side of the Amazon – a bizarre terrestrial rainforest, whose essence is born from the myths, legends and experiences of the region. Perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to say that in classical music Villa-Lobos was one of the leading inventors of the myth of the forest as the source of origin of Brazil. In this music of wild nature, finally presented to us free from the clichés that have burdened it for so long, there is a desire to let the peculiar sound matrix of Brazil ring out at full volume: uninhibited, Dionysian, dazzling, and extravagant.”.Thus, Villa-Lobos is deeply national, but he manages to organically combine the thinking of an academic school composer with the folklore tradition, since the composer grew up in this environment. As a result, we have a single alloy that gives rise to a unique style.
By the same principle, we can analyze the works of Nacho Duato, whose formation took place based on classical and modern ballet choreography, and, due to his origin, the traditions of his country, the peculiarities of thinking and perception led him to interpret choreography through the prism of the national folklore. In his last major work, “Floresta do Amazonas,” Vila-Lobos recreated in music the atmosphere of Henry W. Hudson’s novel, which, in turn, was inspired by the myth of the natives: Abel, one of the heroes, is captivated by the song of an invisible bird, which turns out to be a young woman with whom he falls in love. Their love idyll, which ends with Abel’s escape, alternates with the singing of birds, folk dances and rituals, images of landscapes and sunsets, hunting, chasing, and forest fires.In the original version, Villa-Lobos's work "A Floresta do Amazonas" is a symphonic suite. And if in the musical version the characteristic features of the suite are less pronounced, then in combination with the choreography, they are fully revealed.The musical and choreographic suite includes 9 numbers (selected by Duato from 21 numbers of the symphonic suite of Villa-Lobos), built on the principle of contrasting alternation while maintaining musical, stylistic, and choreographic unity.
Of all the numbers, Duato chooses only 9, building them on the principle of building a dance suite - alternating slow and fast compositions.We give the order and general characteristics of the ballet numbers with a more detailed analysis of the compositionally most significant of them. The corresponding serial numbers of the compositions in the suite of Villa-Lobos are indicated in brackets.
1. A Floresta (In Forest) №2 – Exposition part. It plays the role of an introduction, the beginning of the story. It consists of two sections. The first is slow, plays the role of an introduction. Audio effects, imitation of bird voices and sounds of the night jungle are superimposed on the piano passages (a translation of the orchestral introduction in the original of the Villa-Lobos suite). In the original version, these sounds imitate orchestral instruments. The second section is fast, plays the role of an introduction, the beginning of the story. The corps de ballet appears on stage; this is a joint performance without solo parts. The music is instrumental, a piano solo without vocal accompaniment. The choreography becomes a reflection of the music; the waves in the piano passages are shown in the movements of the corps de ballet on stage. From the very beginning, we can see how the choreographer sets three main plastic leitintonations, which will then run through all the numbers of the production. The first is hands raised to the sky, as a greeting to the sun (the cult of the sun was very common in ancient South American civilizations). The second is hands crossed above the head - a reference to images of the animal world (horns or a bizarre look of tropical birds, as a source of life). In essence, this section is a kind of hymn to the rising sun, or, if we draw parallels, a dance - a ritual of invoking the heavenly body, which gives life.
2. Cair da Tarde (Twilight) № 13 – Slow, lyrical part. The piano sound is joined by vocals and then by the cello, which forms a kind of duet with the voice (resonating with it like an echo, which is also due to the content of the text). And here we see an example of a true synthesis of words, music, and choreography. The same images are embodied in three types of art, each of them, by the artistic means of expression available to it. This scene is the exit of the male corps de ballet. According to the content, which is set primarily by the text (and the music and choreography are already based on it), this is the dawn, when nature, which has become numb, begins to gradually wake up. The duo shows this transition in dance with the help of alternation of statics and dynamics, emphasizing sculpturality of poses. In this, the choreographic line is based on the structure of the poetic text, built on short phrases. At the end of each sung phrase, the dancers freeze in poses that resemble either birds or plants (for example, at the beginning of this number, during a short piano introduction, all five dancers lie on the floor with their legs raised upside down, bent at the knees, like frozen trees or sleeping herons, which are sung about later in the text).As for the choreographic style, here we can find clear elements of the handwriting of two of Duato's teachers - Mats Ek (movement following the hands, the hands begin, the whole body moves after them) and William Forsythe (working with geometry, outlining geometric figures in space). This number also features 3 gestural leittonations from the introduction.
3. Exploracao (Deep In The Forest) № 4 – A number for the female corps de ballet. The music is mobile, dance-like, with clearly pronounced sharp rhythms, instrumental (piano solo), without vocal accompaniment. It is characteristic of this production for corps de ballet scenes that the dancers closely interact with each other, forming either duets or lines, reflecting the choreographer's image of the selva as a single, integral organism. Gesture main leitonations occur here as well. We should also note the work in the dance with costume elements - flying skirts, and the position of the feet, which is uncharacteristic for academic choreography - not with the toes outward, but "onwards".
4. Canto na Floresta 1 (Song of the Forest) № 8 – Slow section. In the original, this number was a vocalise. In the arrangement, it is purely instrumental music for solo piano, to which the cello will be added in the second half of this section. There are four dancers on stage. Three of them are in frozen identical poses, with their hands raised to the sky (it can be assumed that they depict trees), while the fourth dancer in front of them performs a solo part from the parterre combinations, gradually moving to the side, into the darkness of the stage, where she freezes on the floor, only then do the three frozen ballerinas begin to move, and after the corps de ballet binding (in which gestural leittonations are again present) they leave the stage. With the appearance of the dancer who lifts the ballerina frozen on the floor, the cello is added to the piano, and the duet in music is duplicated by a duet in dance. At the end of the number, the dancer drops back to the floor, and the low intonation, where one arm is extended to the sky, is shown in reverse motion, curling inward, towards the body.
5. Danca 1 (Dance of the Indians) № 3 – A fast, active movement, full of Brazilian folklore rhythms. To emphasize the specific syncopated rhythms, percussion is added to the piano. A duet of two men, joined a little later by two female dancers, then everything moves into a general shot, with the involvement of the corps de ballet. The duet of dancers shows the dance of natives, who are perhaps going hunting, or celebrating something (here we can refer to the content of Hudson's novel). And, as in a ritual, mythological dance, they repeat the movement of animals. Their gestures are sharp, the message is active, but not aggressive.
6. Cancao do Amor (Love Song) № 20 – slow section. A cello is added to the piano and voice. In the dance, trio – two men and a girl gradually separate from the general group, which moves as a single unit in the space of the stage. The number begins with the characteristic movement of the dancer’s hands, who raises them slightly bent, imitating the wings of a bird. Then this image develops, since the dancer performs most of the movements on supports, as if floating in the air, this “airiness” and lightness are emphasized by the skirt (blue, which is perhaps also Duato’s author’s idea), and movements of crossed arms are also added, like the wings of a flying bird. But, gradually, as the number approaches the end, the number of upper supports decreases, parterre combinations are added, the dancer often seems to hang on the arms of her partners, and, at the end, she lies down and “falls asleep”. Here we can note the transition from day to evening in a conventional plot showing one day in the life of the jungle.
7. Veleiros (Sailing Ships) № 10 – Fast part, emphasized dance rhythms, very agile tempo. In the original, this composition is performed much slower, and with a vocal part; here, a piano arrangement sounds in a more agile tempo. The entire number is performed by a solo dancer. We can note the influence of the choreographic style of W. Forsythe – in working with facial expressions, M. Graham – increasing the amplitude of movement due to the fabric, Balanchine – classical poses, but with a change in the position of the feet and hands. At the end (based on the content of the text, which, although not heard, is implied in the title), two dancers join, who carry the soloist in the upper free support, so that she (like the sailboats in the text) literally soars above the ground.
8. Danca 2 (Nature's Dance) № 6 – Fast part. A large role is played by percussion (wooden blocks) added to the piano part. The characteristic syncopated rhythm again refers us to American folklore. On stage, there are four dancers - two men and two girls, who interact either in pairs or in a group. In this number, as in all previous ones, there are three main gestural leitintonations.
9. Melodia Sentimental (Sentimental Melody) № 21 – The slow part completes the entire ballet. The circle is closed, night has come again. The verse structure of the vocal music dictates the choreographic structure. The number begins with one couple, but for each verse, a new one comes out, and the previous dancers lie down on the floor and freeze in the depths of the stage. It all ends with a group shot, when all the couples are united again into a single organism, and with a gesture of a hand raised to the sky.
All the numbers of the ballet can be considered as a single semantic line, reflecting a series of pictures from one day of the jungle life. Starting at night before dawn, the story ends in the dead of night. In the ballet, the forest, with its inhabitants, including the animal and plant world and the natives, is shown as a single living organism, whose elements are closely connected with each other. In the choreography, this is reflected in the use of leitonations (gestures) that permeate all images. The plasticity here is dictated by nature itself. It is symbolically embodied in hand movements imitating bird wings or bizarre forms of the animal world, in parterre combinations and the gesture-intonation of one hand rising upwards as a symbol of "germination", in the position of the feet "on themselves", a deliberately emphasized departure from "civilized" academic dance, and even in minimalist clothing, where skirts made of light fabric look like petals of exotic colors.The contrast of tempos in this situation does not delimit the numbers, but combines them into a single logical and semantic structure.The central unifying element here is metrorhythm, which, as is known, is one of the most active dramatic means.
In general, the unity and artistic integrity of the musical and choreographic composition of the ballet are ensured by the fact that both the author of the musical text, Villa-Lobos, and the choreographer Nacho Duato create on the border of styles, combining the academic (created purely by people) and the folkloric (having natural origins). Hence, the common theme of their work is the boundaries between the human and natural world. Both works clearly show a fideistic worldview, conditioned by the culture of the countries where they were born and raised (Spain and Brazil).The theme of the supernatural also gives rise to the theme of the supersensible; here, we are talking about feelings of not only earthly, but cosmic, comprehensive level, and given the close connection of myths with nature, also natural-cosmic.
In this context, let us turn to the role of ritual and myth in dance.Art retains a synthetic character, and this makes it close to myth. The difference is only because myth does not allow for convention, while art, on the contrary, turns to convention and allows for fantastic content, which is perceived as such. Therefore, traditional myth in art turns into an aesthetic and artistic component of a work of art and partially loses its original essence, but continues to influence art itself.Such an influence of myth is not a feature of the 20th century alone, as mythological plots in literature, poetry, music, and painting dominated in the 19th century and even earlier. But in the 20th century, ballet became the most mythological and myth-making art. The mass interest in it in the 20th century coincides with the heightened interest in mythological things in general. The pronounced mythological nature allowed ballet to remain a relevant art; it has a significant connection with the nature of ballet. This is a special type of reflection of reality, characterized by the perception of the world as a whole, which can be brought closer to the perception of reality that is inherent in a child. Ballet is characterized by a special type of narrative, characteristic of children's language, and even ritual dance. Its text is also artificially composed, the naming of objects is carried out by demonstrating them in dance, and the description of actions is concentrated in silent play and conventional gestures. The meaning of ballet lies in the purely plastic designation of the essential forces of the universe. They must be presented as already present in the world, even before they manifest themselves in any actions. This determines such a quality of ballet as expositivity. Similar functions in ballet belong not only to characters, but also to groups of characters, who are collective portraits of personified forces. In these ballet personifications, including those that are direct personifications of natural phenomena, the property of the name is emphasized and accentuated, where the essential thing is not similarity limited to individual details, but rather the endowment of a certain attribute in itself. The choreographer designates the forces and objects of the world he depicts, and gives them names. Such mythological naming is an essential moment of awareness of the universe. The name in ballet appears as a sign of a place in the world.The language of ballet (and dance in general) is a language where action is not separated from its medium, but is integrated into its essence. Therefore, the structure of ballet resists imitation of real action, since ballet speaks the language of nouns, not verbs.
The specific artistic language of ballet is built on the premise that the dancer expresses feelings with the help of the body. When the dancer is presented in his body completely, each of his gestures turns out to be endowed with a deep meaning. What the eye perceives as movement, at the level of perception, turns into a play of emotions or images. Ballet reflects a certain reality that is given to us simply because we are human beings. C.G. Jung introduced the term “archetype” to help us determine the universal nature of this reality. The term “archetype” refers to images and plots that show similarities in all cultures and civilizations, from the deepest antiquity to the present day. Archetypes can include images, characters, and plots. In addition, there are universal archetypes of movement: hands raised in prayer or incantation, or an embrace that demonstrates a body so overwhelmed with feeling that it bends. It is with such archetypal movements that we most often encounter in the art of ballet. These movements allow us to go beyond the boundaries of a specific time and place.Ballet refers to the spatiotemporal arts, representing a sequence of movements performed to music, and this is always a sequence of movements in time. Due to this, ballet acquires the character of a narrative. It may not tell us a story, but it is always a sequence, a movement from one state to another. The plots of ballet, both complex and simple, are, in any case, archetypal. Archetypal stories are so strong and natural that when they are performed in ballet, they do not even require reaching the plot level.
The theme of the ballet, like the music, was certainly not chosen by Duato by chance. Initially, the idea of the ballet was inspired by the theme of saving the Amazon forests, the primeval jungle.In this ballet, the dancers on stage appear as certain “forest spirits”, embodied either in plants or in animals; all these images are created by fleeting but very aptly found movements. In the movements of the hands, for example, one can see either tree branches or bird wings. There are also repeated gestures-symbols, two of which are especially characteristic. The first is the palms facing upwards, towards the sky, towards the sun, which allows us to draw analogies with the myths and cult of worship of the sun god, widespread in South America. And the second is a kind of “sprouting” motif – a hand slowly stretching upwards, like a plant reaching for the sun.The world of nature, untouched by civilization, appears in the ballet in all its diversity: in the solo female dance, the grace inherent in animals (in the broad sense - life and nature itself) is embodied, in the duet of male dancers - activity, rivalry, natural instincts.
But the human beginning is also present in the work, because art always remains a "human view" of the world in general and natural phenomena in particular. And in this regard, the "creative credo" of the ballet master seems to be especially important: "For me, ballet is primarily associated with poetry, rather than with prose or dramaturgy. It is to such abstract images that I gravitate more. Dance has an amazing ability to convey what is inaccessible to words." It is the element of poetry that permeates this ballet, full of special romance and passion.
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