Tbilisi Contemporary Ballet launching new season with premiere
Artistic director Mariam Aleksidze and the company staged a number of productions in the realm of the coronavirus lockdown over the past season. Photo via Tbilisi Contemporary Ballet.
Tweet 
Share
A bill of ballet miniatures and a premiere of a work based on late composer Giya Kancheli's music will open the new season of Tbilisi Contemporary Ballet this month, with the troupe setting out to incorporate experiences of the lockdown into their new creations.
The season will open on an impromptu stage in the inner yard of the Simon Janashia Museum of Georgia, a downtown Tbilisi venue of the Georgian National Museum network, set up to accommodate social distancing recommendations issued for cultural institutions amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The partnership between the contemporary dance company and GNM will be centred around the premiere of Psalm, a 1993 work by Kancheli, an internationally celebrated composer who died last October.
A preview for the season-opening show from the troupe said the work illustrated a convergence of artistic work by Kancheli and Giorgi Aleksidze, a choreographer who led the Tbilisi Opera and Ballet State Theatre troupe in the 1990s and is known for his work on chamber productions for dancers of the state company.
The plot by Aleksidze is based on an expression of the duality of human soul through plasticity, while the score by Kancheli establishes two positions - harmonic and disharmonic - for perception of life" - Tbilisi Contemporary Ballet
A focus on works by Aleksidze is a customary element for the contemporary company, led by the late choreographer's daughter Mariam and itself bearing the name of the ballet master. The young artistic director and the company also staged a number of productions in the realm of the pandemic lockdown earlier this year.
The staging will herald a focus on "precision and complexity" in choreography throughout the new season, the release by the company also said. Staging teams will work to effect novelties in traditional constraints between roles of dancers and their audience, stage boundaries and "relation between movement and beauty".
Dates for productions in the new season - the fifth for the 2016-established group - will be announced by the troupe on a rolling schedule, owing to pandemic restraints.
A fresh production celebrating a Georgian woman poet of a century ago will be livestreamed to social media followers of Tbilisi Contemporary Ballet this Sunday, bringing diary entries of Marijan to life in homage to the pioneering figure.
Tbilisi Contemporary Ballet will tour Switzerland with the company’s staging of STALAG VIII-A, with dance enthusiasts to be introduced to the production at Theater Rigiblick in Zurich in May.
An anniversary of Georgian choreographer Giorgi Aleksidze will be marked next month with a premiere of two of his works by the Tbilisi Contemporary Ballet, a troupe named after the late ballet master.
Dance and stage art enthusiasts in Germany will be the first to see the Tbilisi Contemporary Ballet on tour, as the company prepares to hold its first shows abroad in its third season.
Late Georgian choreographer Giorgi Aleksidze, who led the ballet troupe of the Tbilisi Opera and Ballet State Theatre in the 1990s, will be posthumously awarded the Presidential Order of Excellence later today for "outstanding contribution" to the country's professional dance scene.
Tbilisi Contemporary Ballet and the Giorgi Aleksidze Foundation will be joining a series of international events marking 700 years since the death of Dante Alighieri when the troupe hosts its audience this month for the premiere of Beatrice, a new production inspired by the epic The Divine Comedy by the Italian philosopher and poet.
Tbilisi Contemporary Ballet is working to premiere their latest work, a "multimedia ballet" involving experimental media and dancers of the troupe, at a Tbilisi location recently redesignated from a detention facility to a contemporary art space.
A three-show bill will mark the latest premiere of Tbilisi Contemporary Ballet in the capital next week, with founder and artistic director Mariam Aleksidze bringing to the stage of the city's Royal District Theatre the first instalment in the Bach Project series of the troupe.