Beyond the Prophecies: Nadya Timofeyeva’s Nostradamus

Jerusalem Ballet Brings to Life the Visions of Those Who Saw What Others Could Not

At last, the premiere of Nostradamus has taken place. Although I had managed to steal a glimpse of the set designs a couple of weeks earlier, I could never have imagined that a golden cage might wear a monastic habit, complete with a cowl drawn low over its head: the vestments of Catholic monks, or, more precisely, Dominican inquisitors, the Domini canes—the hounds of the Lord. Within these gilded bars, dance contracts into a convulsive, almost Expressionist distortion. The ballerinas of Jerusalem Ballet literally beat their pointe shoes against the metal. And it is precisely this enforced confinement, this impossibility of extending a step to its customary classical amplitude, that gives rise to an entirely unfamiliar kind of theatrical experience.

                                  Photo by © Ofer Moldovan

Artistic director Nadya Timofeyeva devised the whole visual world herself, designing both the costumes and the sets, though here the distinction between the two becomes almost impossible to sustain: they are costume and scenery at once (when have you seen the like?). Grand battements come to an abrupt halt against the grating; black cowls shimmer silver in the starlight; the physicist Einstein attempts to chart his trajectories around the exposed figures of the monks, as though trying to circumvent history itself. Cages, cages everywhere: those who seemed to wield power, to stand guard over others, turn out to be prisoners of the very system they serve. They are stripped of their robes and suspended above the stage; by the finale, the cages are empty, yet their outlines still echo the silhouettes of the habits they once contained. Liberation has come, but the architecture of confinement remains.

This time, Jerusalem Ballet has played its trump cards. Timofeyeva has conceived a polyphonic ballet on the human condition, summoning Tchaikovsky, Arvo Pärt, Richard Strauss, John Adams and neural networks as her creative accomplices. At the centre of this new production stands Michel de Nostredame, cast as its prophetic figure; joining him are the Maharal of Prague and Albert Einstein. Artificial intelligence, meanwhile, was enlisted as a co-author of the libretto concept, even arranging a face-to-face encounter between Nadya and the Renaissance seer himself (their conversation, by all accounts, ranged well beyond the subject of ballet). For a choreographer trained in the strict canons of the Vaganova school and the rigours of neoclassicism, such a leap into metaphysics is an act of considerable daring. Yet the attempt to translate the theory of relativity and the clay-born physicality of Qliphothic monsters into the language of classical pointe work succeeds spectacularly. At times, I could almost believe that the ballerinas had managed to articulate E=mc² en pointe—particularly in the scenes with Einstein.

                                    Photos by © Ofer Moldovan

Timofeyeva and Inna Polonsky have clothed this philosophical syncretism in costumes poised somewhere between Gothic Expressionism and futuristic minimalism. When these intricate structures begin to move, propelled by the performers concealed within them, a palpable chill passes through the auditorium. Their monumental silhouettes seem intent on swallowing the pioneers who have dared to peer beyond the limits of their own age—first and foremost, of course, the ballet's eponymous hero. Ami Hoejen's Nostradamus inhabits the stage like a man trying to find his bearings in the surrounding universe, to establish some physical connection with the world around him. His choreography makes ample use of floorwork, gliding movements and passages across the white and lavender fabric spread over the stage. In direct contact with the earth, Nostradamus seems to be reading his own visions from its surface. At one point, a globe appears in his hands—no longer merely a model of the universe, but an object he can turn, in the hope that the machinery of creation might turn with it. There is another striking detail: Nostradamus appears almost naked, wearing little more than flesh-coloured trunks. There is no elaborate prophetic costume, no ceremonial grandeur: just the nearly bare human body, a man left alone with the knowledge that has been revealed to him.

The lighting by Ivan Kaygorodov and Maria Zhuravleva works its own magic. It makes the gold of the cages flare ominously, transforming the stage into something resembling an inquisitorial pyre, then fade to the dull, lifeless gleam of antique icon frames. At other moments, the lighting seems almost dutifully to impose order on the chaos of the universe: the darkness of the Inquisition set against the illumination of human reason and science. Pools of light slice the stage into separate temporal zones: one step to the left, and you are in the sixteenth century; one step to the right, and the very fabric of space begins to bend around Einstein.

                                     Photo by © Ofer Moldovan

The scene in which the Golem is brought to life proved particularly captivating. Out of formless matter, something gradually takes shape—something, or someone, destined to acquire a life of its own. Once again, Anael Zateikin held me spellbound. This ballerina is unquestionably entering a remarkable phase of her artistic maturity. At first, her Golem is motionless, as though not yet detached from the clay. Then it begins to move, awkwardly and angularly: it has yet to discover the possibilities of its own body. But soon awkwardness gives way to strength, and strength to destruction. Low, grounded postures, heavy lunges, broad, sweeping movements of the arms: to convey the transformation from inanimate matter into a living being devoid of human understanding, to move from a dense, almost chthonic physicality to the airy, sylph-like freedom of flight, requires exceptional dramatic and physical gifts. Zateikin possesses both in abundance.

There is, incidentally, an unexpected historical echo concealed within this image of an animated statue. In 1927, Vera Shabshai, hailed as the mother of Jewish avant-garde ballet and pantomime, was working on a choreographic embodiment of the Golem at Moscow's Freikunst Jewish Theatre. Shabshai shifted the emphasis to the creature's inner tragedy: her choreography conveyed the Golem's fear of its own body, its clumsy attempts to make sense of the world, and the fatal inevitability of its deactivation. Almost a century later, Nadya Timofeyeva returns to the Prague legend of an artificial being created to protect its community. The connection is not merely thematic; it is personal, too. Nadya studied at the Moscow State Academy of Choreography under Vera Shabshai's daughter, Natalia Kumanina, who, like Nadya herself, now lives in Israel.

                              Photos by © Ofer Moldovan

And then there is the music—how could there not be music? Timofeyeva has assembled the ballet's score from Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture and Sixth Symphony, Arvo Pärt's Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, shamanic drums, the traditional melody Oyf’n Pripetshok, works by John Adams and even Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks. The latter accompanies a delightful little scene featuring six ballerina-planets revolving around a sun embodied by Bezalel, danced by the handsome Michael Botsok. Strauss's irreverent trickster, the eternal mischief-maker who refuses to observe the rules of decorum, frolics somewhere above the stage, thumbing his nose at the Inquisition—and, it seems, sticking his tongue out at the entire apparatus of thought control.

Nostradamus explores the world with his whole body, sliding across the earth, while his planets seem to obey an entirely different set of physical laws, existing on the very tips of their toes.

As for the use of AI as a Golem for our own times, an idea Nadya discussed before the premiere, it feels more like a gesture of choreographic modesty. Ballet is still made by human beings, and, happily for the audience, the dancers of Jerusalem Ballet display considerably more human doubt and living expressiveness in their movement than any algorithmic perfection could hope to offer. And to breathe life into that fearsome golden retinue, to make the audience feel for a living body caught between seven cowls—that is a triumph of Nadya Timofeyeva's calibre as a director and creator.