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Eifman's artistic vision has never been occluded by the filter of good taste. Indeed, that is part of his charm (as it was for the works of Maurice Béjart, whom Eifman has supplanted as the choreographer most beloved by the Muse of Bad Taste), and I still recall Eifman's Tchaikovsky with a mixture of awe, horror, and grudging admiration. Anyone (myself included) can make a bad ballet, but it does take genius to come up something as bombastically misconceived, so truly horrendous on so many levels, as Tchaikovsky. My greatest disappointment with Eifman's Musagéte, the tribute to Balanchine commissioned by the New York City Ballet, is simply that it wasn't awful enough, just ignorant and vile. Although Balanchine himself was fond of judiciously applied vulgarity (he'd often tell his dancers to be more vulgar), he also made that famous, enigmatic aphorism "La danse, c'est une question morale." I can't imagine Eifman making such a statement, or having much interest in questions of taste, except in looking for lines to cross, or appear to do so.

However, at his best, Eifman can be a pleasure, albeit a Guilty Pleasure. There are times when watching his work that I can forget about his often laughable artistic decisions, his bombast and pretension, the earnest naivety with which he presents the blindingly obvious as revelations, indeed, when I can drink the Cool-Aid, turn off my critical faculties (Eifman does give my BS-detector a heavy workout), and, for awhile, at least, just let myself get swept away on the rush of outrageous, caffeinated theatricality. As in most cases in which one suspends one's own critical awareness, I do indeed feel guilty in the morning, but at least I'm not hungover.

Before the fun bad stuff on opening night there was just plain bad bad stuff, as for some reason the program began with the world premiere of Cassandra, a ballet with, as the program modestly states, "Libretto, Choreography and Lighting Design by Nikita Dmitrievsky." Set to a booming and thundering piece by Gustav Holst, Cassandra purports to tell the story of the eponymous heroine's encounter with Apollo, erotic run-in with Agamemnon (portrayed by the same dancer as Apollo for no particular reason) and death at the hands of Clytemnestra. While Elena Kuzmina is certainly attractive in her lingerie-ish dress (Holly Hynes is the "Costume Consultant), and seems quite upset with the turns her life takes, overall, the piece is close to incomprehensible. You can tell Cassandra spends a lot of time dreaming, as she's constantly lying down and getting up, and Clytemnestra is easy to spot as she's the one waving the Japanese-looking sword about, but much of the plot, as outlined in the copious program note is incomprehensible, as Dmitrievsky seems more interested in banal geometric explorations with grouped dancers than actually telling his story. It was a relief when the curtain came down.
 

The program note does refer to Apollo cursing Cassandra by making her "overly eloquent so her words are not understood." At least now I know who writes Eifman's own program notes!

After intermission was the parade of Eifman excerpts. It was actually quite enjoyable seeing these bits and pieces because before a piece would take me to the inevitable point where I'd say, "wait, this is just too stupid for words," the excerpt would end, and more dancers would rush on for yet another pretzellish duet.

After a brief, spirited entrée with dancers in vaguely Venetian costumes (to, of all things, Tchaikovsky's polonaise from his Suite No. 3), along came the first swoopy pas de deux, from Who's Who, in which the dark and beautiful Maria Abashova sits onstage, tying on a toe-shoe, while Yuri Smekalov enters and helps her on with the other one. He helps her rise on pointe, and while at first she wobbles like a newborn foal, she's soon swooping around in supported multiple pirouettes like she'd been dancing all her life. As Smekalov supports and guides her, their lifts and entwinings become (surprise!) more ambitions and wilder, as he spins around in a circle with her legs straddling his waist as her arms and hair fly away thanks to centrifugal motion, or kind of dumps her shoulder-first onstage in something that still manages to be a pretty, curved, dismount. There's a penultimate Big Moment where she lies on her back and somehow braces him so he can arrest himself in a big, downwards plunge towards her, with his legs pointing oh-so-erectly straight up towards the ceiling. (Eifman is rather fond of such time-stopped positions with various limbs pointing upright paging Dr. Freud!) At the final strains of Rachmaninoff, he carries her offstage in a pretty lift.

Then there's a rollicking section for an ensemble in lower-class rags who look as if they'd emerged from steerage on a 1920s voyage to Ellis Island, to more Rachmaninoff which sounds vaguely Klezmerish (go figure). Eifman even has a pair indulge in a bit of girl-swinging Apache dancing, as if to say that men are always swinging women upside down, and there's really nothing new under the sun.

To still more Rachmaninoff, Nina Zmievets and Yury Ananyan danced the melodramatic prison-visit love duet from The Brothers Karamazov. As two men swing around a sort of wheeled lattice of metal bars representing the prison, Zmievets and Ananyan climb and cling to the bars, and through them, each other, as the lattice is swirled madly about the stage. Eventually they dismounted for another ingenious puzzle-box duet (I never suspected there were so many ways for men and women to hang off of each other!), and here for a moment Ananyan lies on his back, his feet and legs arrowing straight up, as Zmievets embraces them with perhaps a surfeit of passion (I do not believe surfeit exists in Eifman's vocabulary, or perhaps in Russian at all), in another perhaps-symbolic gesture. Then it's back to the lattice for more doomed-lover clinches and the final blackout.

Then we had Dmitry Fisher and Ivan Kozlov and a cast of thousands of proletarians in the odd finale of Karamazov. To excerpts of Wagner's Tannhauser we see and hear the saintly and evil brothers argue about the future of humanity, as the raggedly dressed ensemble enacts in dizzy unison the appearance of being happy workers (imagine out-takes from Metropolis) or religious zealots, depending on which brother gets the upper hand. Eventually the good brother reappears in saintly white robes, while the evil one is in full Ming-the-Merciless regalia, in a shiny black jacket complete with science-fiction shoulder-pads, tails and, of course, a codpiece, as he leads the simple-minded workers in his vision of the future as the Aerobics Studio from Hell.

Then there was another swoopy duet, from Anna Karenina, for Abashova and Smekalov again, to the almost-too-perfect "Romeo and Juliet" fantasy of Tchaikovsky. Here, Abashova's in a more-or-less nude-colored unitard, while Smekalov's more conventionally dressed. She's perched in a more-or-less fetal position on a stool, and he sweeps her up and, as in their other duet, gradually awakens her to the joys of Eifman's particular brand of heroic heterosexuality. Again there are Pygmalion-like aspects, as at first she stands with doll-like rigidity, even when he tips her and holds her on her side. After she progresses to some equally doll-like, flexed-foot walkings-on-air, the pair finally come alive with still more romantic twinings. Then in a thundering section for a not-quite-raggedy but very enthusiastic ensemble, she climbs to an upstage platform and hurls herself to her death. (With Eifman, you know if there's a platform onstage, sooner or later someone's going to hurl herself off of it.)

Then was DoubleVoice, the American premiere of an early work first danced in 1977 at the first performance of Eifman's company, then called called the St. Petersburg State Academic Ballet, by the famous ex-Kirov ballerina Alla Osipenko and her husband John Markovsky, to the loud and unfettered vocal stylings of Pink Floyd. As this is the most unabashedly sexual Eifman duet I've seen, I can only imagine its sensational effect thirty years ago, especially as performed by such a venerable and respected star as Osipenko. Here, the amazingly thin Olga Povoroznyuk, in a painted-on unitard, writhes wildly about with the strong, stolid and bare-chested Oleg Gabyshev. I suppose the high point of their duet is when she pretty much throws him on his back, then rather ferociously has her way with him. Between the thrashing and later billing and cooing of the pair, there's not much doubt as to just what's going on (perhaps Eifman had read back then of Arpino's Astarte? which seems very tame in comparison). There's a certain happy wildness in Double Voice which speaks to more than just the music, as if Eifman was still feeling out the dramatic possibilities of such steamy partnering, before, as it were, codifying the style in his more recent works. When it was over I wanted a cigarette, and I don't even smoke.

Next was a nutty reworking of Don Quixote. There are times when I've felt myself about to lose it from too much Minkus, and apparently that's what's happened to the Don here, as Eifman's excerpt takes place in an insane asylum. Here the patients are the raggedy ensemble, presided over by Abashova, here incarnated as a virginal yet powerfully sexy Nurse Rached. In her shining white nurse's ensemble with its flowing skirts, she has perfected a slow, hip-swinging sashay of a walk which allows her to present her beautifully pointed feet at each step, emblems of her power over her charges. With puffs of a whistle, she has them hopping about and playing with a balloon (poor souls, they end up crestfallen when it bursts). After the arrival of the raggedy Don in the person of also hard-working Smekalov, Abashova also puts him through his paces, first with a rubber ball, and then with (be still my heart) a hula hoop. You can't make these things up. In between his bouts with Abashova, the Don conjures up happy ancient Spaniards for some of the bounciest Minkus. Eifman seems mainly interested in ensembles as foils for his heroic/romantic leads. Although his dancers waved their fans with furious brio, they tended to lose themselves in lumps of uninspired leaps and kicks. Anyway, at the curtain, the asylum didn't seem like such a bad place after all.

Eifman himself came out to accept the crowds adulation (it seemed like le toute Brighton Beach was in attendance), and enact a small bit from his Don Juan & Moliere, where he sat at a table trying to get his hands on the imaginary food a half-dozen or so very enthusiastic and slatternly women were gulping down, before all the dancers assembled for a final curtain. It was, in its own way, delightfully silly, and I smiled all the way home, even though I knew I'd hate myself in the morning.