Rodin – Boris Eifman Ballet

The ballet is dedicated to the life and the creative work of great sculptors Auguste Rodin and his apprentice, lover and muse Camille Claudel.

MUSIC M. Ravel, C. Saint-Saëns, J. Massenet
SET DESIGNER Zinoviy Margolin
COSTUME DESIGNER Olga Shaishmelashvili
LIGHTING DESIGNER Gleb Filshtinsky, Boris Eifman

World premiere: Saint Petersburg on the 22 of November 2011

Camille ANDREYEVA LIUBU
Rodin GABYSHEV OLEG
Rose Beuret ZMIEVETS NINA

«Life and love of Rodin and Claudel is an amazing story of two artists, in an incredibly dramatic alliance of which everything interlaced: passion, hatred, artistic jealousy. Spiritual and energetic interchange of two sculptors is a unique phenomenon: living together with Rodin, Camille was not only inspiring him, helping to find a new style and to create masterpieces, but also was going through the impetuous development of her own talent, actually, she was transforming into a great master.
After her breakup with Rodin, Claudel begins to plunge into the darkness of insanity. The soul of a poor woman is burnt to ashes with the pathological hatred to her former teacher and lover man, who had stolen, in Camille’s opinion, her life and gift. Rodin’s longing for his muse, torments of his conscience and delusion of Camille, or the insane Erinye, which her ruthless destiny had turned her to, the delusion caused by her mental disease and full of sick obsessions – all of these are reflected in the new ballet.
With the help of body language we talk in our performance about passion, internal struggle, despair – about all of those life phenomena of human spirit, which are brilliantly expressed by Rodin and Camille in bronze and marble. To turn a moment frozen in stone into an irrepressible sensuous stream of body movements is what I was striving for when creating this new ballet performance.
“Rodin” is a contemplation about the unreasonable price which geniuses have to pay for creation of eternal masterpieces, and also about those torments and mysteries of creation process which will always disturb minds of artists.»
Boris Eifman