Finding passion and sensuousness in Tolstoy and Rodin

Eifman's choreographic work Rodin is dedicated to the life of the great sculptor Auguste Rodin and his muse Camille Claudel. [Photo Provided to China Daily]

Anna Karenina and Rodin - two ballet works by a contemporary Russian dance company - are part of the NCPA Dance Festival. Chen Nan reports

Eifman Ballet, the contemporary Russian dance company from St. Petersburg, will stage two shows, Anna Karenina and Rodin, at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing from Sept 13 to 16.

The two ballets are part of the upcoming NCPA Dance Festival, an annual event initiated by the NCPA in 2012.

In 2006 the company made its debut on the Chinese mainland, staging Tchaikovsky: The Mystery of Life and Death and Russian Hamlet: The son of Catherine the Great, which impressed audiences with its performances in which avant-garde dance is combined with contemporary methods from dramatic theater and film.

"My theater is a theater of open emotional experience," says Boris Eifman, the company founder and artistic director, who is acclaimed as a philosopher in choreography. "Creating my mystery where the characters live by my rules, I'm creating my own world with its catastrophes. This is my own cardiogram, the rhythm of my pulse, its eruptions, shocks, culminations, ups and downs."

Anna Karenina, based on the work by Leo Tolstoy, premiered in 2005 and is filled with inner psychological energy. Eifman focuses on Anna Karenina's love triangle.

Two years ago Eifman brought this ballet work to the NCPA Dance Festival.

Eifman says it is the passion, "the basic instinct", that causes social norms to be violated, destroys mother love and breaks Anna Karenina's connection with her own soul.

The ballet is about the present rather than the past, he says.