Igor Moiseyev State Academic Ensemble of Popular Dance in Hong Kong

Saturdays evenings are usually reserved for the delights offered by the HKPO. But last night, it wasn't them. From the Concert Hall, I moved a few steps to the opposite Grand Theatre. But it wasn't the question of a just a few steps. It was a leap. My heart and my pulses lept with the mainly Slavic dance steps of the Igor Moiseyev State Academic Ensemble of Popular Dance ( otherwise known as Moiseyev Ballet. According to a video clip on the U-tube, Igor Moiseyev was already a ballet master of the Bolshoi Ballet Company of Moscow when he was 26. But his career took a completely different turn when he started the first folk dance company specializing in folk dances of the entire world and became its principal choreographer.I don't know the details of how he did it. But he did it for more 70 years. He died at the age of 102 in 2007. He was credited with having invented a new dance style called "character dance", combining the dance steps of the traditional ballet, folk dance, acrobatics, athleticism and theatrics, a formula which proved eminently successful. It brought him not only to the Bolshoi Dance Theatre, but also the Red Square, the La Sacla of Milan, the Grand Opera House in Paris and the Metropolitan in New York. He won countless awards for his work. If I may judge from what I saw last night at the Grand Theatre, I  think he deserved them all. He was an indefatigable and endlessly creative choreographer, having created through the years more than 200 dances for his company. According to the Wikipedia, in 1953, he was named People's Artist of the USSR, in 1967, got the Lenin Prize for his "A Road to the Dance" , in 1876, declared in Hero of Socialist Labor in addition to four Stalin/USSR State Prizes (1942, 1947, 1952, 1985), Russian Federation State Prize (1996), and numerous orders and medals from his own country and from Spain and other countries and became the first Russian to receive the Order of Merit, First Class when he turned 100. In 2001, he was awarded the UNESCO Mozart Medal for outstanding contribution to world music culture. He died in Moscow in 2007.

I really don't know how to describe last night's performance. I'll probably run out of all the positive adjectives in my limited vocabulary in no time: magnifcent, spectacular, exquisite, great, superb, tip top, exciting, exhilarating and even humorous at times. Not only were the dance steps done in perfect synchronization with the rhythms in the relevant music (which spanned the full range Slavic and Latin world even including in one number, Chinese (!)) the costumes of the dancers  for both men and women were so colorful and the stage props were cleverly minimal, choosing to rely instead on the much more economic but no less effective use of intelligent stage lighting. We had a Russian dance (Summer), a Kalmyk dance, a Tartar dance (Ttarotchka), an Adzharian dance (Khorumi), a suite of Moldavian dances (Khora, Chyokylie, Zhok) some numbers from the cycle Pictures of the Past called "Old city Quadrille",  some dances from the choreographic picture called Partisans, an excerpt from the naval suite A Day on Board of a Ship called "Engine Room", A Bessarabian gypsy dance, a Chinese ribbon dance and two numbers from the Suite of Mexican dances called Sapateo and Avalulko, an Argentinian cowboy dance called "Gaucho, a dance number form a Nanayan play called "Two boys in a fight" and finally a Ukrainian dance called Gopak.

I can do nothing better to introduce this wonderful group of dancers than to provide two video clip from the U-Tube from which one may get a glimpse and a taste of what this remarkable group of extremely professional and talented group of dancers can do.