Solid Ground

“The Black Monk” by Kirill Serebrennikov at the Thalia Theater

Ira Polyarnaya

29.10.2026

Choreographers Evgeny Kulagin and Ivan Estegneev are from Russia. More interesting, however, is what they bring with them to the rest of the world: the bodily experience of walking upright.

Sergio Morabito

Most recently, Chief Dramaturg at the Vienna State Opera

Nothing is more threatened by politics than the body. It can be imprisoned, tortured, or executed. Consequently, it flees into exile – a tragedy shared by thousands of people in Berlin and other major cities. They come from all over – Russia included – because they fear for their lives (often even after emigrating, since politics has a very long arm). Seneca, banished to Corsica, put into words what unites or consoles them in a letter to his mother: The nature of things is the same everywhere. As long as he can watch the sun and moon rise and set, and stay in touch with the stars, it makes no difference what his feet tread on.

Ivan Estegneev in “The Demon’s Sorrow”

Frol Podlesnyi

There is also a dance floor for feet to tread on everywhere in the world where human bodies live. This offers no consolation, but it provides the solid ground on which the body can negotiate its existence. It’s not just about the mind, which is often claimed to be free; the body is not merely an object of punishment or desire. Doesn’t the body have a mind of its own? Seneca saw the mind in the stars – in bodies that never stand still. Not even in exile.

We may have to go back to the time of Seneca, almost to the beginning of our calendar, to the year 41 CE, to grasp that this cannot simply be one more hero myth about Russian dancers in exile, like the one that has evolved around Rudolf Nureyev since the 1960s. These are real people who refine their art through the lens of exile. They include contemporary refugees such as the dancers Evgeny Kulagin and Ivan Estegneev from Kostroma, as well as the better-known director Kirill Serebrennikov. None of them left Russia voluntarily. They were successful there and they are successful here, too. They collaborate wherever possible. In Berlin, they founded a festival titled Kirill & Friends because they have something to say and show. They wrestle with demons and with the politics that unleashed them.

“Dancing Plague”, Workshop von Ivan Estegneev und Evgeny Kulagin

Frol Podlesnyi

Read on …

Demons and Art

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Russian émigrés Ivan Estegneev and Evgeny Kulagin share exile with the world-famous director Kirill Serebrennikov. In Kostroma, the two dancers spent twenty years building Russia’s best-known contemporary dance ensemble. But they are carrying on.

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