Cinema and Performing Arts
The Colour of Resentment Is Blue: A Fairy Tale from the Other Side
In fairy tales, roles are usually assigned in advance: the hero and the villain. But what happens in the soul of one who is immediately cast as the villain? Where do envy and resentment come from, when it seems that life itself has dealt you an unfair hand? It was from these reflections that the play 'The Blue Dwarf, or the Pearl Heart' by the Uzbek National Puppet Theatre gradually came into being. The author of the tale, director and composer Stefania Garaeva-Zhuchenko, artist Alina Korytova and choreographer Alina Mikhailova-Lomans tell the story of how a narrative emerged not about the victor, but about the one whom it is customary to defeat.
It is not easy to be different from everyone else: small among the tall, awkward beside the confident, unlucky next to those for whom everything comes easily. It is even harder to one day see yourself through others' eyes and believe that you truly are worse, weaker, plainer than the rest.
Two brothers
The heroes of this story are a mother and her two sons. By the laws of fairy tale, one is handsome, tall and successful; the other is small, clumsy and, what is more, has skin... of a blue hue. People laugh at him, and his brother is always nearby, a comparison that never works in his favour.
While their mother is alive, in her eyes the sons are equal – there is no handsome and ugly, no fortunate and unfortunate. But one day she is gone. The brothers grow up, and life itself increasingly underscores the difference: for one, much comes easily; for the other, nothing ever falls into place.
The theme and motif of the performance is resentment towards life.
Photo: Igor Mazurkevich'The Blue Dwarf' did not come about at once. At first, the director planned to work with Pushkin's poem 'Ruslan and Ludmila', trying out roles on the actors of the Tashkent troupe, imagining Ruslan, Ludmila and their rivals. Then another thought came to her:
I began to think about Chernomor – why did he become what he is? What if we made him the central character? Someone resentful of the world. Why does he abduct the most beautiful women? He is always just a villain, but what if he is simply deeply unhappy?
Little Chernomor has a giant of a brother. Beside him, his own physical insignificance becomes even more apparent, and envy gradually gives way to hatred.
Almost a century and a half before Pushkin, a similar character appeared in the work of the French writer Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy. Her Yellow Dwarf – small, ugly, yet possessed of magical power – also lays claim to a beautiful woman who has already chosen a handsome and worthy man. The wedding, the abduction, the magic and the struggle for the beauty echo 'Ruslan and Ludmila', although d'Aulnoy's direct influence on Pushkin has never been proven.
The motifs of both fairy tales fed a shared pool of imagery, but gradually an independent hero emerged. He is neither a villain seeking justification, nor a victim permitted anything simply because he was once wronged. Hence the central question: what does a person do with their resentment?
Photo: Igor MazurkevichWhen the fairy tale shows its other side
Contemporary cinema increasingly invites us to look at the stories of characters we once knew only as antagonists. The film 'Maleficent' shows the life of the famous sorceress before she cursed Sleeping Beauty; 'Cruella' portrays the youth of a heroine the audience had grown used to seeing as an unambiguous villainess.
The plot, however, is not constructed to justify evil; it simply explains why evil became what it is.
In 'The Blue Dwarf', by contrast, the hero is still only standing at a crossroads. He is in pain, he feels short-changed beside a brother who received what he himself lacks. And one day the Dwarf meets a Witch, whose proposal is this: why carry a heart within you if it brings only pain? Better to give it away, and in return receive strength, wealth and power, so as to claim what life did not grant willingly.
And it is here that the true story of the Blue Dwarf begins.
When the heart turns black
The first working title of the tale was 'The Tale of the Black Heart'. According to Stefania, it captured well what happens to the hero when resentment consumes him:
You take offence, you cannot accept certain situations in life, and so the heart turns black.
Photo: Igor MazurkevichStefania's children understood this image at once. Listening to the tale of the Dwarf whose heart grew heavy as stone from resentment, they began to apply it to their own feelings.
And the children would tell me: 'Mummy, my heart is black right now. It really is turning black.' They took this image very much to heart.
But in the final title of the performance, the heart is no longer black but pearl. This is perhaps the most beautiful metaphor of the tale – a pearl is born from trauma: a foreign particle that enters the shell irritates it, and then gradually becomes covered in layers of nacre.
Any wound, any resentment, if you work through it, give it time and accept it, becomes your experience, your gift.
Photo: Igor MazurkevichAt the same time, the creators of the performance avoid direct moralising.
A performance is not a lesson. You have to create an environment in which the audience – above all children – will be engaged, and offer images that they will read in their own way. For me, success is when a father who brought his child to the theatre puts away his phone and starts watching the stage himself.
A language that cannot – and need not – be translated
To tell children and their parents a story about resentment, envy, loss and inner choice, yet without moralising, the creators have almost entirely abandoned conventional speech. The characters of 'The Blue Dwarf' speak in a nonexistent, gibberish language. Some words are written into the script, while others are born during rehearsals and improvisations.
The sounds do not matter; what matters is intonation and inner intent. When children are small, they invent their own words too. And so we are, as it were, addressing the 'inner' child.
Photo: Igor MazurkevichThere is also a more down-to-earth reason behind this decision — the staging team came from another country, the actors speak different languages, and at times they themselves had to find ways to understand one another.
They don't understand me, and sometimes I don't understand them. And we have a desire to find a common language. Simply to find a common language.
Choreographer Alina Mikhailova-Lomans compares this approach to a return to the natural state of children's play. A child can pick up a toy, invent a voice for it and even words that don't exist, acting out an entire story in which it is clear without any translation who is arguing, rejoicing or taking offence.
Children always love to give voice to toys and objects. They imbue them with living qualities. From the way they build a dialogue, stories and a kind of dramaturgy emerge. Words don't matter here. But we know what is happening.
There is no dance in the conventional sense in this production, so the choreographer's task is to find a unique language of self-expression for each character.
Photo: Igor MazurkevichThe performer steps onto the stage, yet he is used to working behind a screen. And suddenly he finds himself fully exposed before the audience, but his body seems not to be part of the action: he doesn't know how to move, where to look, how to present himself. For us, everything matters: where to hold the gaze, where to turn, how to shape every gesture. Children 'read' bodies and emotions. And so do adults. A person simply walks in — and we immediately see what is wrong with them.
Set designer Alina Korytova is working to erase the boundary between human and puppet: in the live action, human proportions are altered, shoulders are enlarged, additional volumes appear, and the silhouette becomes grotesque.
And the main leitmotif is metamorphosis and transformation.
On the Mother's skirt, plants bloom and then wither when she falls ill. The Witch changes her appearance. What is happening should be comprehensible even without sound.
Photo: Igor MazurkevichThis brings us back to the question of the Dwarf's appearance. Is he truly ugly in himself, or have those around him convinced him that he is? Here one recalls Alexander Kuprin's fairy tale 'The Blue Star', in which notions of beauty depend on who is looking: she who is considered plain in one world turns out to be a beauty in another.
As for the colour of the main character, the creators were not immediately decided either. At first they thought of yellow — the colour of irritation, biliousness, inner resentment — but in the end they chose blue.
It is the most mystical, enigmatic, beautiful and mesmerising colour.
The Dwarf also proved to be the most technically demanding character: several stage incarnations were created for him, and the stage space itself helps to alter familiar human proportions.
The Dwarf puppet is the most complex one. Work on it has not stopped to this day.
Photo: Igor MazurkevichMusic that 'listens' to the story
Another language of the production is music. Stefania combined the recorded sound of classical instruments with live Uzbek ones — alongside the harp, flute, violin, cello and clarinet appeared the nay, dutar, gijak, koshnai, doira and kairak. Even the addition of the chang was discussed.
Right up until the last moment I worried about how exactly my music would sound with the Uzbek instruments, how it would all come together. Music is that very kindness which helps the characters in difficult moments.
It seemed to me that this is music which itself listens to the story and listens to the people on stage.
Photo: Igor MazurkevichResentment and fate — who holds power over whom?
Creating a world on paper is easier than making it come alive on stage. When sketches have to be turned into wood, fabric, mechanisms and puppets, and imagination has to be adapted to the human body, one must 'fight to the last' for every image, because even a small detail can become an important part of the overall concept.
When you are not bound by any scale or material constraints, you can allow yourself anything at all. And then comes the anchoring to reality.
The feeling of being different does not end when a person grows up. One continues to compare oneself with others — those who are more successful, more beautiful, stronger. The production makes the audience reflect on where the path of bitter resentment might lead. Is the world truly so unjust, or is it our own perception that poisons us? Is there a way out of this trap?
We will see the answer to this question on stage.
Photo: Igor Mazurkevich
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