Is it already Christmas? It glitters on the stage of the Nuremberg Opera as if all employees had unpacked their tinsel supplies. The set designers Leticia Gañan and Curt Allen Wilmer only picked up a good deal of the material from which the rescue blankets are made, which warm refugees after their journey across the sea. And it is also a sea that billows over the stage in Goyo Montero’s two-part ballet premiere; a sea of bodies, whose flowing, highly complex, intertwined movements carry individual bodies upwards like foam crowns – and mix them in again. Because the community is what this is about. Its utopian potential, its fragility and its failure.
The fact that a prominent guest like the Russian prima ballerina Diana Vishneva fits so smoothly into the Nuremberg ballet ensemble is one of the many highlights of the evening. The unpretentious grace and performance with which she dances on many of the aforementioned foam crowns is another. The first part of the evening – “Maria” – was choreographed by Montero for the exceptional artist. Vishneva is Mary Magdalene, the confidante and perhaps the beloved of Jesus, who is embodied by several dancers. That seems a little promiscuous, but never frivolous, but underlines the sovereignty of a woman who acts on an equal footing with men.
May the others be hell too – we are chained to them
But the interplay of the shiny ensemble with the stiffened silver foil, which piles up to form a threatening wave wall, arches into a protective cave or is turned into a golden canopy, from which the dancers tear pieces off in order to transform themselves into dazzling steles or them, is also spectacular to roll to cross beams. How close sorrow and joy lie to one another is also told by the music by Lera Auerbach (“Dialoge mit Stabat Mater”, based on Pergolesi), which comes partly from the orchestra pit, partly from the tape, and the “Last Songs” by Richard Strauss, reinterpreted by Montero’s house composer Owen Belton : Scores as demanding and multi-perspective as Montero’s choreography. Michel Foucault’s “Madness and Society”, Sebastian Brant’s satire “Ship of Fools” – a bestseller from 1494 – and Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of the same name are just three of the sources from which the second part of the evening feeds, in which the dancers wear the gender-neutral dresses of the beginning for fool’s hats and insect-like breast and leg armor.
In search of a better life, some dare a cheeky solo, others have lost their desire for it under the burden they carry. It is the (futile) hopes and struggles for survival of bygone generations of mankind such as the refugees at today’s borders of Europe that Montero shows here. And the way he does it is equally sad and beautiful, concrete and abstract, a feast for the eyes and food for the brain: foil lianas that are reminiscent of barbed wire are swung into a boxing ring or on a galley made entirely of bodies like whips. Two dancers are connected at the heads by a stocking-like hose during a gorgeous duet. And yes: May the others be hell too – we notice it also in the pandemic – we are tied to them and lost without their solidarity. But this existential rush has never been served so magically: Soprano Emily Newton sings about the last glow of sunset and great sleep, the sea of foil arches in the blood-red light – and in the midst of the dead the next fool starts a funny dance. This gentle, utopian evening in tune with the times is a gift!