Blood Memory

What do children remember of their parents’ wars? More than we may think, argues Russian choreographer Alla Sigalova in Final Cut, a dance performance on the emotional legacy of conflict. Fusing modern dance with with acting and the music, the piece portrays a generation’s efforts to understand the battles of their forebears.

First developed in 2011 with students of the Moscow Art Theater School, Final Cut grew out of rehearsal-room discussions about memories of war and their heredity. Sigalova and her students traced the destruction of freedoms—personal, political, and emotional—through historical conflicts to the present day. “Everyone at some point in their life experiences dramatic humiliation of some sort, and also some kind of limitation on their freedom,” she said in a translated interview. “And I’m sure that experience is passed on through generations.”

To trace this passage of experience, and to develop a performance exploring these themes, students shared the letters and diaries of family members. To the Russian and Belorussian students, World War II and the Soviet-Afghan War had left the heaviest legacies. In their parents and grandparents’ stories of combat, imprisonment, and displacement, students saw the seeds of their families’—and their countries’—present circumstances. These stories, and the reflections they prompted, served as the basis for episodes in Final Cut. Now re-imagining the piece in Cambridge with second-year students in the ART’s Institute for Advanced Theater Training, Sigalova hopes to add American perspectives to the mix.

Dancing these stories from the past, Sigalova hopes to prompt in audience members the same reflection she encourages in her students. By leading audiences “deep into the roots” where family and conflict merge, Sigalova hopes to stir the residual experiences passed from one era of war to another—as she puts it, “to awaken their blood memory.” In the context of current international conflicts, Sigalova feels this collective reflection is direly necessary.

Sigalova is known for bridging disparate tyles. Final Cut features the unique blend of genres which has served as her signature in performances across the globe. With degrees from both the Vaganova Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg and the Russian Academy of Theater Arts in Moscow (where she earned a master’s degree in directing in 1985), Sigalova has been working to fuse ballet and traditional drama for her entire professional life. After beginning her career as a choreographer at the Satyrikon Theater, she has brought her dual set of skills to genre-defying original shows which have toured internationally.

“I have developed my own language,” she says, citing a diverse vocabulary of influences including choreographer Leonid Jakobson and actor/teacher Michael Chekhov, as well as various masters of ballet, jazz, and modern dance. Hers is a language without words—even in her interpretations of well-known plays, the characters speak only with their bodies. But behind the choreographed storytelling is the bedrock of Russian dramatic arts, Konstantin Stanislavsky’s “System.” In Sigalova’s work, performers must merge dancers’ exactitude and finesse with Stanislavsky’s insistence that physically and mentally inhabiting the role onstage is the basis of live storytelling.

Silent but exact, rooted in human psychology and the expressive potential of the human body, Sigalova’s synthetic language is uniquely poised to address international audiences. Like the communal memory of war she explores in Final Cut, her performances grow out of a deep, eternal space shared by families on both sides of the trenches.

This article originally appeared in the A.R.T. Guide, published by the American Repertory Theater.