Beyond Sin

“Human being is a mystery. It needs to be unraveled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.” These words of Fyodor Dostoevsky perfectly match the description of the creative path of Boris Eifman, who in each of his works intently and earnestly studies the most complicated aspects of spiritual life.

The Beyond Sin ballet is a new choreographic interpretation of Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. By having fundamentally re-thought and re-worked his own earlier world-renowned 1995 production The Karamazovs, also based on this timeless masterpiece of Russian literature, Boris Eifman created a psychodrama, rich in thought and emotion.

In terms of both artistic expression and the technical solution, Beyond Sin is a modern stage creation, which broaches age-old “accursed” questions. In the context of the almost universal values crisis of the early XXI century, the choreographer turned to the non-negotiable, secure ethical foundations and staged a ballet that explored issues of theomachy and God-seeking, of faithlessness and faith, of the nature of sin and of spiritual salvation.