Like on a roller coaster ride, you are pushed backwards into the not exactly comfortable seat of the State Opera, only to be immediately sucked forward onto the edge again. Those on the stage are dancing at high speed into a kind of ritual trance, as if they had long forgotten us, the audience. The Israeli choreographer Lior Tavori lets the young women and men of the Bavarian Junior Ballet show great, disturbing dance art barefoot, to the choppy, pulsating music of the composer Itamar Gross (commissioned work).
“Bonbon” he calls this premiere at the autumn matinee of the Bosl Foundation. For whatever reason. Nothing is sweet there, we see – as clinically cold quotes – gestures, steps, formations from the folk dance, which is part of the survival culture in Israel. And there are men’s duets, women’s duets, no, duels, jumping acrobatics, close-to-the-ground, erotic embraces, gangs. Everything under high tension, instinctive and yet incredibly precise. Not really a piece for a midday dance, but full-length in its great quality.
The house was almost sold out at the Sunday matinee, which offered a lot more besides this miracle of expenditure. Many in the audience almost missed Tavori’s candy fountain because they thought the “love messages” had already been the climax. Eight extremely elegant choreographies to songs by Franz Schubert (from the tape), sometimes calm, sensitively softly danced to Christine Schäfer’s crystal-clear soprano, sometimes as explosive body work to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s baritone. It was all soulful and technically masterful.
The small inaccuracies that had previously disturbed the synchrony in Georges Balanchine’s “Allegro Brillante” were quickly forgotten. This classic, so to speak, as a highly demanding warm-up exercise, without which, as is well known, ballet cannot work, as the young students of the Munich Ballet Academy demonstrated with infectious joy in their “Exercices” at the beginning. It’s your own fault if you miss the second performance on December 4th.