Choreography, production: Maria Kozeva in collaboration with Dialogue Dance Company
Music: Medeski Martin, Jon Christofer Nelson, Astor Piazola and others.
Stage design, costumes: Maria Kozeva, Elena Safonova
Light: Sergey Kuzmich
Soundtrack production: Olga Golubeva
Text: J. Winterson translated by Anna Timofeyeva P
erformers: Viktoria Hloptceva, Tatiana Mazaihina, Ivan Estegneev, Ekaterina Polyakova, Evgeny Kulagin, Olga Kapustina.

Lighthousekeeping – a novel by a British writer Jeanette Winterson, where a small child named Silver, having lost her parents, goes to live on the lighthouse, becoming a pupil of Pew the lighthousekeeper.
Lighthousekeeper – a performance by Contemporary Dance Company Dialogue Dance created by Maria Kozeva, premiered on Octover 2, 2006 in Kostroma.
Ing-ness, which is present in the title of the novel reaches the state of wholeness in the performance, that is a difference between keeping and keeper. It lives in the piece being the breath and continuation of life. The name of the piece tries to bring action to a circle, repeating the form of the lighthouse, to make it alive, because the Keeper is a live person. The focus shifts fromaction to the person who performs it. The action itself never has a subject and only a person who performs it gives it a meaning, true meaning of his traits and character. If the starting point would stay as the novel of Winterson, but another company would dance it instead of Dialogue Dance, it would be completely different performance and a very different story. I think that the sensitivity of the dancers let this story happen.
Every person is a story that he tells. However one can tell a story about himself or tell himself as a story. I hope that the story I am telling you will give you a part of my warmth.

I’ve spent two nights watching Wang Kar-Wai’s Happy Together, as I left my house I had nothing to do but turn out to be in Buenos Aires. Tango followed me, reaching me even in a coffee house. Lighthousekeeper for me began with tango. He swims gasping for air in the waves and then the light catches another one who also fights and is losing his breath, but now it is two of them, which means that they will reach the shore.
If tango is a march, then it is a strict structure. Strictness actually was absent in the piece. It had tenderness, softness, special humanity, perhaps because this is especially felt in Kostroma. Everything is made of simple parts- space, time, movement and idea, dancing in the heart and becoming a feeling this way.
Lighthousekeeper has transparency, and not just because Pew himself becomes a silhouette made with a wire that draws a side-view of a man in sailor’s shirt and cap, sitting in a chair and smoking a pipe or a dancer in a coat and every dancer takes Keeper’s place for some time as if becoming Pew for some time. That is everyone can be a lighthousekeeper because everyone has a story that asks to be told and each can give light to others.
Tango. It is impossible to dance it alone. The duet of Evgeniy Kulagin and Ivan Estegneev it is not the tango that characters of Kar-Wai dance in the movie, not the classical tango, the image that comes to one’s mind when the word is said. The tango here is a state of being on the edge, where the connection can be cut abruptly at any moment, the open arm will not find an answer, but this doesn’t take place. It is the opposite, the dancers seems to forefeel the direction in which the partner will take a step, they don’t know it but they make guesses and their guesses are right. Like pieces of one puzzle they find their only right place.

Jeanette in one of her interviews said: “My territory is a human heart”. Her novel is a sequence of stories told as if they are messages in bottles, which you can open one by one hearing more and more the beating of human heart. If someone is interested in ideas, somebody in characters, she is attracted by feelings.
I cannot say that she studies them scrupulously; she lets them happen and gives us an opportunity to see them with her. She has a very special way of owning the language. She is not afraid to play with words in that game of words that almost cannot be translated, when the game allows meaning and poetry appear simultaneously. At the same time she creates crystal clear images, very simple, without anything unnecessary. Reading her texts you can see what is happening not just in the plane of text itself but in full volume of feelings.
The excerpts from the novel by Winterson, which served as a starting point for the Lighthousekeeper are spoken in the piece by one of the dancers. Every phrase has so many sides that you can listen to it again and again. However the text naturally fits in the fabric of the piece, and doesn’t become the illustration for the dance, a background and is not parallel to what is happening, creating its own reality. It says “listen to me and I will tell you about places where you have never been and perhaps never will be.”
«There was a man not far from here, and when his ship was sinking he tied himself to a piece of spar and for the seven days and seven nights he was at sea, and what has saved his life, while others were drowning, was that he was telling himself stories like a madman, finishing one he would start another. On the seventh day he told all the stories her knew and then he started telling himself as a story. The story that he was telling, choking, trying to get out of the waves was a bout a man lost and found not once but many times. And when the night came he saw the light of Cape Wrath that was lit only for a week, but the light was there and he knew that if he becomes the story of the light he can be saved. With all strength left he started to row towards the light, his arms on the sides of the spar and in his mind the light became the shining rope that was pulling him in.»

Seamen go to the sea to come back and come back to go back to the sea. The sea is the distance that has to be overcome. There’s a ship on one end of the trajectory, there’s a lighthouse on the other one, the light that saves, that means that the shore is near, there’s the sea between them and life that goes according to its own rules and laws. The sea is that canvas on which the fabric of the performance is born. It rushes in with the sound of the waves. It gives a special quality to the dancers’ movement. The lighthouse, just like Pew, doesn’t leave the stage during the whole performance. It is static in the first part, just its light comes and goes, as it is supposed to be with a lighthouse, but in the second part the construction goes up and disassembles, and the chaotic movement of three tubes, as if following only the winds, add dynamics to the time flow. The dancers make the “legs” of the lighthouse into huge megaphones, perhaps calling someone, through the waves noise and hen look into them as if into telescopes. There is a magic feeling of beauty and reality in what is happening. And there’s a desire to think that their voices will be carried to the once whom they were addressed, and through their telescopes they can see the biggest stars that are visible only at the sea.

«We are lucky, even the worst of us, because the dawn comes... the day comes and you are alive!» The lighthouse is a well know point in darkness. Darkness and light, warmth and cold. Even if the performance is easy to watch the ideas that are imbedded in it are quite dense and not banal by any means- the human existence between light and darkness, warmth and cold. Can you live in darkness? You can live without turning on the light, with a blind heart that doesn’t feel warmth, you can live without seeing light physically, blind like Pew and still keep the warmth. At some point the light will enter any darkness. You can live in darkness, if you are yourself a source of light, even dancing in it. Perhaps all the stories are told to survive and to see how the sky starts to change colors for the light.
Lighthouse is a point that gives light for four exact seconds, and then the darkness comes again. The four seconds are a story told, you are lucky if you have heard it and seen the light. Two of them, he and she, stand looking up, at the light, waiting. He stands on the edge of the stage and calls for the dawn. The search of light, life, love is a search, so there are no ready made answers.
«Tell me a story, Pew.
What story, child?
A story with a happy ending.
There is no such thing in the whole wide world
Such as happy ending?
Such as ending».
There is not ending indeed, there is only one story told with a last phrase that goes - “I love you. The three most difficult words in the world. But what else can I say?”

A week have past after the performance, I- drink tea with my friends, walk on the bank of the pond, watch the snow fall in the window, and every day there is a second that wound like a seashell in itself the infinity of time, the second when I catch myself as if by an accident repeating this phrase.