ANNA KARENINA Eifman Ballet of St Petersburg What is it about Anna Karenina that has entranced film and stage artists alike, and encouraged them to revisit the story in the grandest, wildest productions possible? For Boris Eifman, the reason lies deep inside the human psyche. “I feel compassion for Karenina – for the woman who was killed by a ruinous passion for a man,” says the Russian choreographer who founded Eifman Ballet of St Petersburg in 1977, and is counting his take on Leo Tolstoy’s sweeping novel among its repertoire’s strongest performances. “Above all, I was attracted by the great gift of Tolstoy, who managed to carry out an amazingly accurate analysis of moral death of the woman in his novel. I think he is the first psychoanalyst, and that he anticipated [Sigmund] Freud. The intellectual and emotional depth of the novel prompted me to create the ballet.” Eifman’s theatrical vision, famed for its emotional excess, will be on display at Eifman Ballet’s Hong Kong performances as the opening programme of this year’s Eastern Europe-themed World Cultures Festival. The choreographer considers the passionate and erotically charged ballet to be a reflection of his company’s artistic originality. Eifman says the challenge was “to plunge into the inner world of a woman who despised all principal norms and values [except] for love and passion”. He had to understand the nature of the catastrophe of Anna Karenina , as well as find “plastique” means to show the tragedy on stage, he says, referring to the Soviet ballet expression that combines classical steps with the full use of the torso. By largely filtering Tolstoy’s high society tale – which is set in mid-19thcentury Imperial Russia – down to its essence of a scandalous love triangle of Anna, her lover Vronsky and her abandoned husband Karenin, Eifman is keen to acknowledge the special responsibility he faces in adapting classical Russian literature for the stage. “As an artist developing a special language of psychological ballet, I have the right to give a daring representation of well-known literature,” he says, adding that an artistic breakthrough is impossible without freedom from the dominant conceptions of the work. “I try to keep the maximum solicitous attitude to the artistic individuality of a writer and his work,” Eifman says. As Tolstoy himself said of family, so we should say of classic literary adaptations: the irresponsible ones are all alike, but every sincere attempt, such as Eifman’s, has to be at least interesting in its own way. edmund.lee@scmp.com Hong Kong Cultural Centre Grand Theatre, 10 Salisbury Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, October 18 and 19, 7.30pm, October 19, 2.30pm, HK$150- HK$550 Urbtix. Inquiries: 2370 1044