En Pointe: Eifman Ballet St. Petersburg’s Rodin

Rodin tells the story of sculptor Auguste Rodin and his lover and muse, Camille Claudel

Thursday night, Russia’s Eifman Ballet St. Petersburg company made their Canadian debut in Toronto, presenting a stunning visual display with Rodin.

The new ballet by Boris Eifman was inspired by the dark life and art of famed French sculptor Auguste Rodin.

Rodin weaves the tale of Auguste Rodin and his tumultuous, tragic life, with Camille Claudel, his muse and mistress.

Eifman’s Rodin is pure dance and storytelling magic from start to end.

The entire performance is highly accessible to the audience, with instantly familiar and highly enjoyable music by Ravel, Saint-Saëns and Massenet.

As noted in the program, with Rodin, Eifman created a contemporary performance where dance and sculpture come together to find an unprecedented camaraderie in a modern ballet of love, lust and jealousy. For 15 years, Rodin and Claudel had been one sensual and creative body. A painful break-up shattered their personal and artistic relationship and Claudel’s mental state. She declined into paranoia and lived out the rest of her life, isolated and forgotten for 30 years, in an asylum.

The angst that the original Rodin and Claudel must have felt was displayed succinctly on stage through dance, staging, direction, lighting and score. Everything comes together perfectly to goosebump inducing perfection. “To turn a moment, frozen in stone, into an irrepressible stream of sensuous body movements is what I was striving for,” says Eifman.

Rodin is worth the price of admission, if only to witness this breathtaking scene

Choreographer: Boris Eifman

Music: Maurice Ravel, Camille Saint-Saëns, Jules Massenet, Erik Satie

Set Designer: Zinovy Margolin

Costumes: Olga Shaishmelashvili

Lighting: Gleb Filshtinsky, Boris Eifman

Thursday, May 23 to Saturday, May 25, 2013, 7:30PM