Bavarian State Ballet (Munich)

“Cambio d´abito”, “Adagio Hammerklavier”, "Violakonzert/II"
Bavarian State Ballet
National Theatre
Munich, Germany
April 12,2008

by Horst Koegler
copyright @2008 by Horst Koegler

Among the four German Ivy League ballet companies of Berlin , Hamburg, Munich and Stuttgart, the Bavarian State Ballet, housed at the beautiful Munich National Theatre, is certainly the most classically oriented. Solidly established under the experienced direction of Konstanze Vernon in 1989 as part of the greater Bavarian State Opera establishment, it has been led since 1998 by Ivan Liska, formerly John Neumeier's star-pricipal in Hamburg. Its repertory offers the most comprehensive survey of Petipa of all German troups, including the Tchaikovsky classics plus “Don Q”, “La Bayadère”, “Raymonda” and the recently added “Le Corsaire”.  Other choreographers contributing substantially to the bulk of the repertory are Cranko (the three full-lengths), Balanchine, Neumeier, MacMillan, Van Manen and Kylián through Childs, Ek, Preljocaj, Teshigawara and Forsythe. Its annual Ballet Festival Week opened this year with Van Manen´s “Adagio Hammerklavier” of 1973 vintage, flanked by two creations: Simone Sandroni´s “Cambio d´abito” and Martin Schlaepfer´s “Violakonzert / II”.

Sandroni is Italian, a man of the free scene, who with his Czech wife Lenka Flory runs a company of his own, Déja Donné, near Padova, but works mostly as a freelancer with various groups all over the continent. He started as a dancer with Wim Vandkeybus and his Belgian Ultima Vez company, whose improvisational style obviously influenced him as much as that of the other Belgian Alain Platel of Les Ballets C. de la B. He has based  his “Cambio d´abito” (Change of Clothes) on various pieces for violin and piano by Bach – and it´s difficult to imagine a ballet farther away from “Concerto Barocco” (actually it reminds me a bit of Platel´s “lets op bach”). It is set for fourteen dancers, who constantly change their dresses from the costumes littering the stage if not floating down from the flies. This adds up to a pop patchwork of highly colourful, varied and often quite humorous high-jinks, with a sole man at the center, desperately fighting to cover his nudity with a towel, which his colleagues try to tear away.

If Sandroni wants to show us how much the clothing of people destines their character and behaviour, his choreography reflects this process of transformation hardly, if at all. Actually it is the constant surprises of changing decorative parts – walking walls behind which people disappear to reemerge as completely different creatures some time later – that cause the amusing surprises, but after a while the joke peters out and this is not really helped when a huge panel with hundreds of  garments attached to it is lowered, looking like a a painting by James Ensor (another Belgian inspiration). Finally it all adds up to a collage of clothes, for which the designing rosalie (spelling her name thus – she is one of the most sought after theatre designers in Germany) has obviously ransacked the wardrobe department of the State Theatre. It´s a choreography for costumes rather than dancers who nonetheless perform it boisterously, like a charade at a childrens´ birthday party. 

rosalie is also in charge of Martin Schlaepfer´s  final Sofia Gubaidulina based “Violakonzert/II (its II referring to his “Violakonzert” of  2002 which he set to Alfred Schnittke´s eponymous composition). In contrast to “Cambio d´abito” it lacks any colour apart from a red beam which threateningly is lowered from the flies. Instead it suggests an environment of numbing grey, with a lot of silver wired objects in a sort of labyrinth, through which the dancers move, uniformly clad in black gym shorts and white tops, rather ragged and full of holes. In his first ballet for a troupe not his own, the 47 years old ballet-director from Mainz has taken the chance to fully use the Munich recources, setting his 35 minutes  piece for 31 dancers, among them the elite of Munich´s principals, including Roberta Fernandes, Lucia Lacarra and Sverine Ferrolier, and the males Alen Bottaini, Tigran Mikayelyan, Cyril Pierre, Lukas Slavicky and Marlon Dino.

Gubaidulina´s is an awe inspiring work for a soloist and big orchestra, mesmerizingly realized by Dietrich Cramer and the Bavarian State Orchestra under the strategic direction of  Robertas Servenikas. It hauntingly exorcises an archaic ritual in strongly variated sections, which often at the brink of brightening up in concentrated melodic flow get abruptly halted to start anew on its melancholic path of sighs. This is followed by Schlaepfer meticulously in a gigantic choreographic jigsawpuzzle of seamless episodes mostly in small groups which then crystallize in bigger ensembles, with individual lines getting knotted up and then are entangled in synchronized parallel movements. There are very few solos, hard to identify because of the dimmed lighting. and even fewer big ensembles of the concentrated whole troup, which gather in tremendous momentum. The vocabulary is splintered academic, with lots of breaks and edgy deviations. The girls are mostly on point, while the bodies seem to quiver under electric shocks. On the whole, though, the ballet resembles more a  an addition of single scenes than an integrated whole, and in reflecting closely the music´s torrents and tumbles  it is certainly overchoreographed, desperately in need of a a cleaning up. Obviously Herr Schlaepfer has still to learn the Balanchine “Apollo” lesson  of clarifying the art ´by reducing all the multitudinous possibilities to the one possibility that was  inevitable´. The dancing though, left nothing to be desired, with the Munich company performing Gubaidulina/ Schlaepfer´s “Sacre du temps chaotique” with the devotion of  acolytes practicing their daily prayers. 

After which one wished that Van Manen´s “Adagio Hammerklavier” had been placed as the finale of the programme. For in its purity, clarity, transparency and almost mathematical choreographic logistics, it represents an act of hommage to the very virtues of classical ballet. Performed by a cast of six from the the company´s roster of principals, including Severine Ferrolier and Tigran Mikayelyan, Roberta Fernandez and Lukas Slavicky, Lucia Lacarra and Cyril Pierre, it materialized like a civilized conversation of equals about the sublime ideals of their art, incredibly beautiful to look as the essence of humanity.

Photos:

Violakonzert/II (Martin Schläpfer): Lucia Lacarra and Cyril Pierre, photo: Wilfried Hösl
Violakonzert/II: Ensemble, photo: Wilfried Hösl
Cambio d’abito (Simone Sandroni): Ensemble, photo: Charles Tandy
Adagio Hammerklavier, photo: Wilfried Hösl