History
The third Context. Diana Vishneva Festival took place in Moscow, November 24-28, 2015, and was dedicated to the memory of Maya Plisetskaya, who had been the head of the festival’s board of trustees. At the festival’s invitation, the legendary Martha Graham Dance Company, created by Martha Graham, one of the founders of modern dance, came to Russia for the first time. The company performed three of its most classic choreographic works: Chronicle, which Graham had once staged for her own performance, Lamentation Variations, written on motifs from the Lamentation solo, and The Rite of Spring, an interpretation of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet. For the second time in Moscow, one of the Netherlands oldest dance companies, Introdans, performed, providing an Evening of Dutch Masters with choreographers Nils Christie, Ben Holder, and Hans van Manen.The audience had the chance to see two works of van Manen’s: a male duet Andante and Diana Vishneva’s joint performance with the principal dancer of the National Ballet of the Netherlands, Artur Shesterikov, in the experimental Live.
Itzik Galili brought his work Man of the Hour to Moscow. Brenda Angiel and the Brenda Angiel Aerial Dance Company from Argentina literally managed to elevate tango – by performing in the air.
Context also hosted an All-Russian Competition for Young Choreographers for the first time. Six choreographers made it to the final with their smaller productions: Elizaveta Nekrasova, Konstantin Semyonov, Mikhail Kolegov, Arina Trostyanetskaya, Sonya Ovsepian and Yekaterina Leshchenko. The judging panel consisted of Diana Vishneva, Hans van Manen, Alexander Samodurov, and Samuel Wuersten. At the Gala Evening of the competition, Liliya Burdinskaya, the winner of the 2014 competition, presented her work Inner V; Konstantin Semyonov would go on to win the competition and afterwards receive a grant to the internship at the Carolyn Carlson Center for Choreographic Art in Paris.
The Context. Diana Vishneva film program included the aptly named Rare Birds—a film on the genesis of Alexander Ekman’s A Swan Lake, such films as Never Stop, The Person Backstage, Ballet Classes, Six Seasons, and the Russian premiere of Andrei Severny’s Gravitation: Variation in Time and Space starring Diana Vishneva.
