In Eno Henze’s digital stage design, clear lines cast soft shadows. And during the 30 minutes that David Dawson’s “Affairs of the Heart” last, larger areas of color nestle in between. Alexei Ratmansky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” is danced in front of Kandinsky’s brightly colored “Squares with Concentric Rings”. And in the finale designed by Marco Goecke, gray confetti erupts in the space-filling black. That says a lot about the three dance pieces, which are as different as they are consistent in themselves, and which opened the Munich Ballet Festival Week on Saturday under the title “Passagen”. A triple bill of clear handwriting and emotional states has succeeded, which picks up the audience of the Bavarian State Ballet where it was able to gain the most visual experience under Igor Zelensky.
The jerseys accentuate every muscle: “Affairs of the Heart”.
(Photo: Serghei Gherciu/Serghei Gherciu)
The Brit Dawson, who like Ratmansky is one of the most sought-after choreographers on the international ballet circuit, has at least one and a half legs (and the corresponding pointe shoes) in the (neo)classical canon of forms. In his first creation in Munich, his dancers revel in the music, which here sets the warm, sometimes rapturous tone. Tall arms, faces directed towards the sky of the stage and a love of tirelessly varied lifting figures characterize the world premiere, which is named after Marjan Mozetich’s violin concerto “Affairs of the Heart”.
It’s something for the heart and for the eye when Dawson lets his whitecap creatures surf on the sounds and drift towards each other with increasing passion. But while the jerseys emphasize every muscle, the view of the individuals remains obscured by the virtuosity. And with war right on your doorstep and a ballet director Igor Zelensky, who still doesn’t want to comment on his relationship with Putin, the play seems irritatingly apolitical. Or do they all end up grouping together in a row to form letters? Do you really read a “nonono …”?
The boss stayed behind the curtain – literally and figuratively
One had asked oneself in advance whether Zelensky would show up at the festival, whose silence is now booming in the increasingly dense confusion of confessions. But the boss stayed behind the curtain – literally and figuratively – while his guest Alexei Ratmansky flew the flag. Not surprising, given that the Russian choreographer, with a family and professional background in Ukraine, is one of the most committed voices against this war. So, at the end of the applause, he unrolls the blue and yellow banner and stretches it behind his shoulders like a sail. It’s hard to say what Ratmansky was more applauded for in the end: for this gesture, which in times of great symbolic substitute actions is almost a bit cheap, or for his almost exuberant movement design based on Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”.
Exuberant movement design: “Pictures at an Exhibition”.
(Photo: W.Hoesl/W.Hoesl)
The choreography that Ratmansky invented for the New York City Ballet in 2014 also caught fire in Munich. Between Dmitry Mayboroda’s delicate piano playing, which drives away any memory of dry music lessons, and Wendall K. Harrington’s video-animated image extractions from Kandinsky’s color studies, a colorful troupe of jugglers mediates, who bow to the classical vocabulary, but use it freely. Movements are interrupted, collapse abruptly or are combined in new and cunning ways. Sometimes a foot trembles humorously in a pas de deux, sometimes arm poses grow into rotating windmill blades. Sometimes the five couples seem to come straight out of the pictures, then again it’s as if the feet and hands themselves are dancing on the keys. And in the solos – above all in the dance of the witch Baba Jaga, which the New York ballerino Amar Ramasar performs as a guest – the role clichés are subverted from the inside out and playfully shaken off.
It is only logical that Marco Goecke’s “Sweet Bones’ Melodie” concludes the triple. Conductor Tom Seligman, who calls Unsuk Chin’s abstract composition “Mannequin” a “monster”, succeeds in taming this monster in the orchestra pit without putting it in chains. But the twelve dancers on Marco Goecke’s foggy stage can’t get rid of their invisible chains. When they stiffen their limbs and claw their hands in an attempt to hug, it reads like a sinister echo of Dawson’s longingly raised arms. The confetti ash rising from beneath them may have been remnants of Ratmansky’s Festival of Colors.
A dove of peace? Marco Goecke’s “Sweet Bones’ Melodie”
(Photo: CARLOS QUEZADA)
This dark, melancholic finale is typical of Goecke, whose spasmodic, choppy body language is already iconographic. But this huge imbalance in the community structure that is such a body also fits cruelly well into this time. The reigning choreographer of the year doesn’t have to wave any additional fence posts. A single shirtless male torso in a group scene gets the association machinery going. The whispered lines of the poem “End of the World”, in which Else Lasker-Schüler got to the bottom of “weeping in the world” in 1905 – and the dove that the young António Casalinho does not dare to let go. Not a play about the war, but damn close.