THE CUCKOOS

CUCKOOS is a dance performance by dancers from St. Petersburg’s Kannon Dance, one of the pioneers of Russian contemporary dance, formed in St. Petersburg in 1999 from students of the school with the same name. The non-state Kannon Dance group actively and altruistically popularized modern dance among amateurs, and introduced a taste for "contemporary" dance among the St. Petersburg youth in the early 2000s, and in addition, made successful tours of national and international dance festivals. This was the heyday of contemporary dance in Russia, in many respects, it was a financially poor, but happy period for young independent groups. But, more than ten years later Kannon Dance is one of the major players in the Russian dancing field.
The CUCKOOS in this production by Alisa Panchenko are young women in colourful dresses, combining a range of dance techniques, from modern dance to contact improvisation in a versatile and flexible manner,. Their wordless story has an everyday background - these girls are looking for a way to have a good time, relax, and if possible, not to depend on men. Even if the CUCKOOS have gender roots, they are weakened and organically combined here with the dancers’ nature - easy, free, playful and flirtatious.

Kristina Matvienko

While remembering their mothers and grandmothers, the heroines try to change the female line of the entire mankind, by giving it a new cut as though it was a light cotton dress, and changing the surrounding reality with existing relationships in their own complicated way. A bizarre game of presenting various "women", carefree dancing and unbridled desire of absolute and rather deranged happiness gradually reveal the conflict of the heroines: they all are their own foundlings, abandoned, lonely and a little crazy. But each, somewhere deep in her heart, wants to build her internal "nest" with chirping fledglings in a high tree, under a clear sky. And while they are on the way to it, the process of abandoning their own essence for themselves with its subsequent ejection will be an exciting time, that is not devoid of “foolishness”, "joys" and “revelations”.

Alisa Panchenko

THE CUCKOOS is a performance about the women's world and women's souls, investigated by Alisa Panchenko with grace, tenderness, sadness and humor.
There are eight performers in the black box of the stage in search of happiness, in search of "their cuckoo", meaning themselves. Perhaps they can be compared to the heroines of the play by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya Three Girls in Blue. There are women easily abandoning their children like cats abandon kittens in it. It is extended in Panchenko’s play: female cuckoos can not build a nest and nurture children-fledglings, so white, bird eggs are broken, and at the end of the performance, the heroines slide across the stage flooded by broken eggs.
There are no men in the performance, but they are present there, as they are present in the life of every woman, if only in her dreams there is Her Man. Their constant, invisible presence is proved by a picture on the desk, the telephone near which one of the heroines suffers waiting for a call, and male names exclaimed by the heroines.

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