“Of the ballet choreographers making narrative works for major stages, Russian Romantic Boris Eifman is virtually the only one totally in touch with the 21st century.” “Eifman’s large, versatile St. Petersburg company remains faultless.”
-The Los Angeles Times

“It is, at every turn, audacious, inventive and stunningly beautiful.”
-Chicago Sun-Times

 

Boris Eifman’s ballet Rodin tells about the life and work of two great sculptors: Auguste Rodin and his disciple, mistress and Muse – Camille Claudel.

 

The story of their love is truly a tragic one. For over 15 years Rodin and Claudel were one integral whole, both sensuously and creatively. The breakup of the lovers that ensued eventually was a fatal blow to the mental health of Camille leading to her tragic end. Half-forgotten, hardened, hopelessly impecunious, Camille goes mad. A paranoiac idea of a conspiracy against her being lead and inspired by Rodin himself incessantly torments the already weakened mind of the wretched woman. 30 long years had she spent in a mental clinic just to die in 1943, forlorn and completely forgotten by all and everybody.

Eifman’s Rodin is a comprehensively creative study of such a subject as how tragic may be people of genius’ lives. By resorting to the uniquely plastique of the modern psychological ballet, that was so brilliantly mastered by the choreographer in his other productions (Onegin, The Seagull, Anna Karenina, Russian Hamlet, etc.), Boris Eifman not only offers a new interpretation of the world of human passions studied masterfully by Rodin and Claudel, but creates a picture of the insoluble mystery of the creative process.

 

 

A ballet by Boris Eifman
Music: Maurice Ravel, Camille Saint-Saëns, Jules Massenet
Sets: Zinovy Margolin
Costumes: Olga Shaishmelashvili
Light: Gleb Filshtinsky, Boris Eifman