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Home | Specifications | Contents | How to Order "DIANA VISHNEVA: BEAUTY IN MOTION" In Performance (fragment)
© Nina Alovert … Performances like these begin in a stuffy dressing room, where, as Diana beats her pointe shoes against the wall to soften them, she starts to think about the role she will dance that night, entering the psyche of another being whom she knows intimately because she is her creator. While her costume still hangs from its hook, and before her hair is pinned with ornaments and fastened with hairspray, Diana stands before the mirror and goes over each pose, calling to mind the feelings and the state of mind she associates with those gestures. Soon she is not alone. When Diana looks at her reflection, it is Juliet who looks back at her, eyes wide with innocence and tingling with the expectation that her world is about to open and that something great will happen to her. Or there stands Nikiya, the humble temple dancer with the urn of water on her shoulder, who finds the strength in love to defy supreme authority and whose ghostly power will bring the stones of the temple crashing down on the heads of her murderers. Each night, in the mirror, Diana meets someone different. Yet they all have the same oval face, and the same candid brown eyes. Inhabiting these roles, when she goes on stage they fit beneath her skin. A special energy radiates from her center and extends to the tip of every finger held carefully in place. Her foot reaches out and its pointe finds a secure place to turn, its arch a silken standard of perfection wherever she plants it. Then her limbs stir briskly. The light material of her costume flows and is whipped by the passing air as she leaps. The sensuous curves of her figure stretch. With every movement and every pause, this woman’s firm and radiant muscles communicate an emotion, a sense of place and time and the consciousness that each unfolding scene is special. Although the backdrops are painted, the ballerina’s living body becomes a source of authenticity creating an illusion more convincing than the pale facades of the world outside the theater. Diana is generous. She shares this vitality with the audience as if it were an elixir. In a theater packed with thousands of breathless viewers, she offers each one a gift---an invitation to join her and become more fully alive. © Robert Johnson
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