Back to its African Roots

John Neumeier´s “Othello”
Stuttgart Ballet
Opera House
Stuttgart, Germany
April 24, 2008

by Horst Koegler
copyright @2008 by Horst Koegler

When John Neumeier, then  31 years old, started in 1973 his directorship of the Hamburg Ballet, he commissioned a full-length ”Othello” ballet from Gerald Humel, an American composer who lived in Berlin and had just scored a hit with “The Tortures of Beatrice Cenci”, written for Gerhard Bohner, one of the pioneers of  the infant German tanztheater movement. But when Humel delivered his score, Neumeier was not satisfied with it and thus the planned Hamburg staging was cancelled. However, the idea let him not go, and so he produced “Otello”, Verdi´s dramma lirico, in 1977 at the Bavrian State Opera in Munich (with Juergen Rose as designer). Eight years later the time of another attempt to deal with Shakespeare´s “Tragedy of Othello the Moor of Venice” had come, for which Neumeier emigrated from the Hamburg opera-house to the Kampnagelfabrik, a workshop setting, where his “Othello" was premiered in 1985 , Ballet by J.N. after Shakespeare, choreography, production, stage, costumes and lighting by J.N. -  a unanimous success, not et least thanks to an ideal cast with Gamal Gouda (Othello), Gigy Hyatt (Desdemona) and Max Midinet (Jago).

In spite of repeated demands, Neumeier refused to transfer it to the opera-house proper, and so the production was shelved  for another twenty years, until it was revived in March this year at its original place, the Kampnagelfabrik. But he yielded to the invitation  of the Stuttgart Ballettintendant Reid Andersen, and so his “Othello” made his bow on  April 24 by the company and at the same stage, for which he had originally created “The Lady of the Camelias” and “Streetcar Named Desire” a quarter of a century ago. It was the first time he had given one of his Hamburg premiered ballets to the company of his apprentice years. Acknowledging the standing ovations of the first night audience, he seemed deeply touched.

And it fits the Stuttgart Ballet as though it had been created for it and especially for its superb contingent of males. They spill through the doors of the auditorium clamorously and take possession of the stage like a wild horde of Africans, creating chaos on what is supposed the Piazza di San Marco in Venice in front of a huge tent which serves as the unique set for both acts. They resemble  a bunch of refugees from Darfur invading La Serenissima. This marks the strong African tintura of the production, the elementary atavistic roots, which lurk behind Othello´s loving nature, represented by his shaman alter ego, a frightening blackamoor warrior, much admired by Desdemona. Neumeier traces the background of his characters to its sources, and so is Desdemona´s pure and angelic appearance reflected in her Botticelli like Primavera alternative. This lends his figures an enormously wide scope of interpretative possibilities.

Thus the drama enfolds on two different levels, the realistic action blending into the surrealist probings into the souls of its protagonists. Accordingly Neumeier works with a much more varied vocabulary than he has used ever before, starting on an incredibly touching and vulnerable tenderness, when Othello and Desdemona meet for the first time, growing from there into the wildest bizarre hallucinations. And if Jago is introduced  as a blond angel, he shows his sadistic vices in the the treatment of the soldiers and especially in the  humiliating tortures of his wife (in fact  I have never experienced in a performance of Shakespeare´s play or of Verdi´s opera as gripping a portrait of the miserably suffering Emilia  as the one by Sue Jin Kang – otherwise Cranko´s  sovereign Tatyana and  Neumeier´s noble “Lady of the Camelias”). In his pas de deux Neumeier shows the lesson he has learnt from Cranko in the gradual building up of growing relationships – here he binds them through changing Shakespeare´s handkerchief into Othello´s loincloth which becomes finally Desdemona´s shroud <I take this from the dictionary for the German Leichentuch as the cloth with which a corpse is covered>.

It is a ballet of tremendous force and candor, which even in its longuish slow motion passages keeps the tension sizzling, covering an enormous scope of contrasting styles, from historical references to the Moresca dances of the renaissance through the acrobatic battle fighting which we know from Chinese films. But there is a natural flow between the single dances, with one yielding to the next, so that the individual acts, the first playing in Venice and the second on Cyprus. appear not as a succession of single scenes, but as a compact entity. The compass of the vocabulary stretches from classical  academicism through the tanztheater loans from straight play acting and under stress to shrieking and howling, challenging the performers to the limits of their powers (even poor Emilia – and in appearance Jin Kang is a rather fragile girlish type – has to utter frightening cries, while her husband Jago treats her like commanding his recruits at the barrack square).  Though there are moments of touching tenderness the overall impression is of  terrifying violence – even of violence against oneself, when the demonic powers of ones innermost passions erupt. The conflicts raging in oneself drive the persons into a state of frenzy, and none more so than the sadistic Jago, as which Marijn Rademaker delivers a highly complex character portrait which has its roots in his frustrated love. It is this multifacedness which makes the characters so fascinating. They seem to be frightened the most by themselves when they recognize the chaos lying in wait under the polished surface of  the conventions of their everyday behaviour.

There yawns an abyss in everybody of us. And thus Jason Reilly´s Othello, noble of mind and with his polished manners, acts like a domesticated tiger, under whose smooth skin smolders  an indelible fire. Stripped down to near-nakedness when he presents his loincloth to Desdemona, he oozes virility from all his pores and his dancing projects an irresistible athletic power. Measured against him Katja Wuensche seems a rather pale and one-dimensional Desdemona, not at all the Madonna-like incarnation of luminous purity which is at he core of Gigi Hyatt´s Hamburg interpretation. The other rather nondescript performance is the Cassio of Alexander Jones, while Douglas Lee as Desdemona´s father Brabantio is the dignified Venetian senator who watches with suspicion the growing infatuation of his daughter with this African tribal chieftain. Like Desdemona the other females remain somewhat  pallid, the Bianca of Myriam Simon and La Primavera of Elizabeth Wisenberg, but then this is very much the tragedy of males, and Stuttgart´s males are superb, like having had their basic training at a camp of marines (they are thirsting for a production of “Le Corsaire”).

If I have still one reservation, it concerns Neumeier´s choice of music. While I have to admit that his selection of historical pieces from the renaissance plus  compositions by Arvo Pärt, Alfred Schnittke and   the Brazilian Nana Vasconcelos, performed by the Stuttgart State Orchestra under the direction of James Tuggle, have been selected  to create an appropriate sound environment, I wish that he had collaborated with a legitimate composer, to contribute a score in a more direct sort of  connection with the scenic action.  But then I have to admit  that I am spoilt by Verdi and his perfect musical metamorphosis of Shakespeare´s text.

And yet, leaving the theatre after following Neumeier through his complex intellectual quest of clearing  the African jungle of Othello´s soul, one desires nothing so much than to return to the simple and straightforward four persons retelling of the story in José Limón´s “The Moor´s Pavane”.

Photos:
Katja Wünsche and Jason Reilly (Photo: Stuttgart Ballet)
Katja Wünsche and Jason Reilly (Photo: Stuttgart Ballet)
Jason Reilly (Photo: Stuttgart Ballet)