HSE Dancers Examine the Dark Side of the Female Soul

The HSE’s Sona Hovsepyan Dance Company has won the grand prize at the Klyuchi (Keys) experimental dance festival, also taking home a cash prize and the right to perform and premier an original show at the 2017 festival.

The Sona Hovsepyan Dance Company performed an 11-minute extract from the Dark Femininity show in front of a jury comprising director and choreographer Egor Druzhinin, Broadway Dance Center teacher Charles Smith, and actress Ebony Johnson.

Dark Femininity is a joint piece developed by Sona Hovsepyan and famous accordionist Arseny Strokovsky. The musical part of the show involved complex, avant garde pieces by Scandinavian composers – performed by Arseny. The choreography and staging is based on the Kabbalah myth about Lilith – Adam’s first wife – who is said to have become an evil daemon.

‘The music we chose not only difficult for the audience, but also for the dancers, as a dance troupe we managed it, although I still don’t quite understand how,’ Sona said. ‘It involved a huge amount of pressure and concentration. The show combines the latest technology and classical dance, we use pointe shoes. Dark Femininity is an auteur piece, it is highly experimental and was a real test for me, as a choreographer, to see if I could learn a new language. And working with avant garde music means you simply can’t limit yourself to stylistic boundaries, there are many different layers involved here. Now we’re working on a show and performance for the Golden Mask expert council, we’ve put in our application, it’s been accepted and that’s already a significant professional achievement.’

The performance can be seen in its entirety on May 23 on the Grand Stage at the ZIL Cultural Center.