Anna Karenina arrives in Mumbai as Eifman ballet brings a fierce new language of emotion

When the Eifman Ballet premieres Anna Karenina at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai, the production enters a city that has learned to read its own contradictions with unusual fluency. That meeting feels almost inevitable. Eifman has spent decades shaping a choreographic world that operates like a pressure chamber, where emotional intensity accumulates until it ignites. Mumbai, at this moment, possesses an audience that seems fully prepared to enter such a space and stay there.

The ballet, the city of dreams, and the emotional terrain

Premiered in 2005, Anna Karenina condenses Tolstoy’s meticulous architecture into a vivid exploration of the triangular relationship among Anna, Karenin and Vronsky. The ballet focuses on Anna’s inner combustion, the spiritual and erotic territory that erupts once she steps outside the fragile harmony of her marriage. Although the production is rooted in one of the most familiar novels in world literature, it feels designed for contemporary spectators.

Eifman’s own comments reveal how deeply he engages with Anna’s crisis. Reflecting on the character, he describes her as a woman consumed by something far more corrosive than love. “Anna’s passion wasn’t love; it was possession, carnal and all-consuming. It tore her soul apart and guaranteed her destruction,” he explains. “Suicide wasn’t just relief, it was the only way to kill that thing living in her.”

This is the territory he works in. Movement is not merely symbolic but diagnostic, a way of identifying what cannot be spoken. The creative process itself, he admits, is something he barely understands, even after six decades of choreography. “People constantly ask about the origins of my movements and choreographic images,” he says. “It remains a mystery, a sacred ritual.”

Inside Eifman’s interpretation of Tolstoy’s tragic heroine

Eifman’s own comments reveal how deeply he engages with Anna’s crisis. Reflecting on the character, he describes her as a woman consumed by something far more corrosive than love. “Anna’s passion wasn’t love; it was possession, carnal and all-consuming. It tore her soul apart and guaranteed her destruction,” he explains. “Suicide wasn’t just relief, it was the only way to kill that thing living in her.”

The creative process itself, he admits, is something he barely understands, even after six decades of choreography. “People constantly ask about the origins of my movements and choreographic images,” he says. “It remains a mystery, a sacred ritual.”

His dancers must navigate that mystery with extraordinary physical range. The ballet moves from the cold poise of St Petersburg society to the thrill of the horse races, from marital fracture to opium visions and finally to a death that arrives with tragic inevitability.

Tchaikovsky’s score, the sculptural sets by Zinovy Margolin and the severe, elegant costumes by Vyacheslav Okunev turn the ballet into a kind of fever dream, where the familiar becomes charged with foreboding.

This is the first visit of the Eifman Ballet to India, and for the National Centre for the Performing Arts, it marks an ambitious step in its wider mission. Mr K. N. Suntook, Chairman of the NCPA, sees the collaboration as a continuation of the institution’s founding ethos. “By bringing a company like this to Mumbai, we are saying: Indian audiences are ready for work that challenges them, not just dazzles them.”

His view of the city’s shifting cultural appetite is equally perceptive. Technology, he believes, has paradoxically heightened the desire for live experience rather than satisfied it. “People watch clips online and follow these companies,” he notes. “But that access does not fulfil them. They need to be in the room, unable to pause or skip ahead.”

Why the Eifman Ballet’s India debut matters for Mumbai’s cultural future

Mr. Suntook’s long-term vision places this collaboration within a larger trajectory. For Mumbai to become a genuine centre for the world’s most important performing arts companies, ambitious productions must appear with regularity rather than in occasional bursts. As he puts it, “One extraordinary production every few years does not build infrastructure. Consistent exposure to the finest work elevates what people expect and crave.”

When the Bolshoi starts planning its next season, or when choreographers like Eifman map out their tours, Mumbai ought to be top of the list indeed. Getting to Mumbai will take some cash and a fair amount of perseverance - not to mention the bit of doggedness that Mr. Suntook is always going on about - though the funding climate is rarely going to make that easy. Nevertheless, the returns are clear: the audiences in Mumbai are now, to put it bluntly, not quite so easily impressed. They walk into a performance with a discerning eye, a genuine curiosity & a real hunger for something that's going to challenge their thinking.

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