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The Brothers Karamazov

Production: Eifman Ballet
Language: Russian (briefly)
Translation: English subtitles
Running time: 1h 26m

​The Brothers Karamazov novel is the epitome of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s creative work, the acme of the philosophic investigation carried out by this colossal and restless mind throughout his life.

World renowned choreographer Boris Eifman offers a remarkable vision of the core ideas within the novel, expanding upon them though body language as a way of exploring the origins of the moral devastation of the Karamazovs; creating through choreographic art an equivalent of what Dostoyevsky investigated so masterfully in his book, the excruciating burden of destructive passions and evil heredity. 

Boris Eifman is considered to be one of the leading choreographers in the world. After working for 10 years at the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet, in 1977, he formed his own ballet ensemble, interweaving classical ballet, modern dance and ecstatic impulses to create a completely different form of choreography where self-expression becomes the subject and in which there is drama, philosophy, characters and a central idea. A distinct feature of Eifman’s theater, its trademark, is that almost all of his performances have a plot and, often, a literary source. In this way he can plunge into a realm that is familiar, all the while discovering and revealing the unexplored. His unique lexicon and conceptual, authorial interpretations are a breakthrough into that fantastic dimension where the boundlessness of inner worlds comes to life.

Maria Shevtsova is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths University of London. Her books include Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance (2004), Fifty Key Theatre Directors (2005, co-ed), Robert Wilson (2007; updated and extended second edition, 2019), Directors/Directing: Conversations on Theatre (2009, co-authored), Sociology of Theatre and Performance (2009), which assembles three decades of her pioneering work in the field, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (2013, co-authored) andRediscovering Stanislavsky (forthcoming November 2019. Her books and articles have been translated into thirteen languages – Dodin and the Maly and Robert Wilson into Russian in 2014 and 2016. Shevtsova is an invited theatre critic, lecturer and interviewer in various languages at prominent universities and other institutions, and theatre festivals, notably the Golden Mask National Theatre Award and Festival in Moscow and Territories at Moscow’s Theatre of Nations. She is co-editor of the internationally renowned journal New Theatre Quarterly. Since 2011, she has been an elected member of the Academia Europaea.