In the Line of “Coppélia” and “The Nutcracker”
“Leonce and Lena”
Aalto Ballett Theater Essen
Aalto Musiktheater
Essen, Germany
May 2, 2008
by Horst Koegler
copyright @ 2008 by Horst Koegler
At 39, Christian Spuck is the older one of Stuttgart´s tandem of resident choreographers – the other being Marco Goecke, born in 1972. Stuttgart can be happy to have two choreographers of such complimentary talents. Spuck, a product of the Stuttgart John Cranko School, joined the company in 1995, choreographing his first piece for the renowned Noverre matinees already one year later, then a young man of 27. He is clearly the more intellectually programmed of the two, while Goecke, who hails from Wuppertal (but has nothing to do with Pina Bausch), is the more bodily minded one, starting as a choreographer at age 28. Today they are both regularly creating for their home company, but are in great demand in Germany and abroad – and they have both already worked with American companies, Spuck repeatedly with Hubbard II and Goecke with Peter Boal´s troupe.
Spuck´s list includes already about two dozen titles – many based upon literary sources, among them Wedekind, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edward Bond and most recently a highly individual (and his most successful) “Don Q” as ´a not always danced revue about the loss of reality´ for two of Stuttgart´s most popular dancers, the veteran Egon Madsen and the youngster Eric Gauthier (who has just quit the company and established a modern oriented group of his own, Gauthier Dance).
Many of Spuck´s pieces are heavily text loaded, mostly in English, but occasionally in German. It´s a tendency which is considered highly progressive by some of my German colleagues. Though I am fairly well versed in English, I don´t like this at all, and find it an insult of the audience, which after all is substantially German. For the first minutes one listens concentratedly, but then the attention on the words begins to wander and one registers the text only as a noisy nuisance, challenging me to call his pieces chatterbox ballets. Therefore I followed Spuck´s career so far with more respect than with genuine appreciation. I never doubted, though, his solidly classically based talent, his highly developed constructivist and architectural intelligence and his instinctive musicality – though his predilection for collages of pieces from different composers causes me occasionally heavy qualms (I admit that I am rather conservative in my musical tastes, and that I find any computer generated surgery rather annoying). But there are always at least stretches in his ballets which I find spellbinding, and he has a special talent for building up avalanching big ensembles (which when for instance stimulated by Shostakovitch´s accelerandos are really irresistible). Generally he is a very serious intellectual, but every now and then he reveals himself as a legitimate comedian, and this nowhere more so than in his “Grand Pas de deux”, created in Stuttgart several years ago to Rossini´s escalating “Thieving Magpie” overture, poking fun on all the absurdities of ballet in a hilarious masterpiece, competing with Tudor´s “Gala Perfomance”.
After choreographing already for Essen (city of the Folkwang School, from where emerged Kurt Jooss´s “Green Table” during the ´thirties), a full-length “The Children, based upon Edward Bond´s rather grim drama of growing up in a stiffeningly bourgeois family, he created now another evening-long ballet, inspired by one of the very few comedies of German literature, Georg Buechner´s “Leonce and Lena” of 1836 vintage (Buechner is the author of the internationally better known “Woyzeck”). It emerged as the absolute highlight of the German 2007/8 ballet season, timed perfectly with the end of Essen´s 13 years successful artistic ballet-directorship of Martin Puttke – who is Germany´s top-pedagogue and as such one of the foremost disciples of the Moscow based Nikolai Tarasov medthod. It is a melancholy comedy, an acid satire of Romantic ideas and the stupidity and good for nothing blockheadedness of the German aristocracy of the post-Napoleonic age, garnished with some surrealist fairy-tale extravagances. It tells the story of Prince Leonce, an incarnation of human laziness. bound to marry the Princess Lena, but who flees with his servant Valerio the country, while the Princess, abhorring the idea of marrying, does the same with her governess Rosetta – only to run into each other without knowing who they are. Not without some complications they fall in love and return in disguise to the Court of their parents, whose royal highnesses, sadly mourning the loss of their children, decide to nonetheless marry them in effigy, with automatons as bride and bridegroom. In fact it is Leonce and Lena, who perform the rites wearing masks, which they then drop to the astonishment of the courtiers, while the King abdicates and Leonce takes over, Valerio is appointed State Minister and idleness is declared the official virtue of the citizens, so that the original order is restored and the country falls back into its state of doldrums.
How to dance laziness and ineptitude? For this Spuck has invented a style with many floor patterns and acrobatic poses, while the body lies flat on the floor and the legs perform poses in the air or the dancer sits on a board, his feet dangling in the air. It looks like animated cartoon choreography, mechanically executed, like Olympia does in the first act of “Tales of Hoffmann”, full of sudden stops and halts, which are arrested in fermate poses. It is very funny to watch, and Spuck really manages to stretch it over the two hours duration of the performance as if invented for a Disney film. It is full of laughter provoking surprises, caricaturing the persons –the formal moving of the courtiers and their mannered rituals, but also of the more earthy jinx of the peasants and the citizens (looking a bit like being inspired by Bruegel paintings) – yet never violating their human dignity. Only once the Prince and the Princess launch into the lyrical flow of a classical cantilena – the dancing equivalent of opera´s belcanto, and that is the moment when they become aware of their tender loving relationship – and for this Spuck has invented wonderfully poetic sequences of steps, so that they materialize like danced lyrics.
There is not a single word spoken, all traditional pantomime gestures are abandoned and integrated in the continuous flow of the movement. The ballet starts and ends with a group pantomime of the courtiers, as if they had been arranged for a photo shooting (one of the links – maybe a quotation - from the “Green Table”). Other borrowings reminded me of Massine´s “Gaité parisienne” and of Crankos´s “Taming of the Shrew” – but then, as it is a ballet with such strongly profiled characters, I saw it in the perspective of Ninette de Valois´s “The Rake´s Progress”. Actually I see “Leonce and Lena” standing in the line and tradition of “Coppélia” and “The Nutcracker”, ballets which derive from some other literary sources like E.T. A Hoffmann´s ”Der Sandmann” (which Spuck has choreographed some years ago) and of his “Der Nussknacker und der Mäusekönig”) . With its references to the petty bourgeoisie of the German princely estates of the 19th century, it could well become a German classic like the French “Coppélia” or the Russian “Nutcracker”.
The more I think it a pity that Spuck has missed the chance to collaborate with a creative composer instead of being satisfied with a patchwork arrangement of mostly waltzes, galops and polkas from the Vienna Strauss dynasty, plus some imports from Delibes, Ponchielli and contemporary sources like Bernd Alois Zimmernann, Alfred Schnittke and even some pop songs. Even if they have been selected carefully, exactly fitting the individual dramatic situation, so that they sound like having specially been composed to accompany the scenic action – and tightly choreographed by Spuck, so that I could hardly sitting still as my limbs began to become independent, I could not help thinking what a unique classic the ballet might have become if Spuck had found a composer, able to proceed with these electrifying tunes from the Strauss family like Stravinsky did when he ransacked the Paisiello archives for musical inspirations for his forthcoming “Pulcinella”, instead of continuing in the tradition of Rosenthal, Mackerras, Lanchbery and Stolze, concocting their scores for Massine, Cranko and MacMillan. Nonethelss how Spuck choreographed the finale to Josef Strauss´s “Plappermäulchen”, it exploded like an elementary thunderstorm – a natural apotheosis for the traditional New Years Eve concert of the Vienna Philharmonic.
Anyway it is funny to watch – and much more subtly choreographed than the appropriate ballets by Massine and Cranko and as the scenes seamlessly blend into each other on the revolving stage. designed by Emma Ryott, Spuck´s favourite English designer, also in charge of the colourful costumes, the ballet proceeds like a brilliantly cut movie, powered by the exhilarating sounds of the orchestra, the Bergian Symphony, conducted by Florian Ziemen. And though it is stylistically miles apart from what the 29 dancers of the company are generally accustomed to, it is executed with Swiss clockwork precision by the Essen company, truly fabulously synchronized in its many stop and go enchantments - a splendid proof of the Russian schooled classes, often conducted by Puttke himself (who does not choreograph himself). And the dancers, assembled from all over the globe seem to exuberantly enjoy their work, so different from what they are normally doing. Tomas Ottych, who hails from Brno and Bratislava, is as Leonce the perfect embodiment of a Romantic German youth, not blasé et all, but oversensitized, a daydreamer, like a cousin of Pushkin´s Lenski or Schumann´s Eusebius, with Ludmila Nikitenko as his adored Princess Lena, a delicately featured classicist with a strong technique (she dances Odile in “Swan Lake”) who comes from Kiev. As Valerio Denis Untila, brought up in Moldavia, is a legitimate descendant of the commedia dell´arte Truffaldino, a goodnatured buddy and joker, with Yulia Tsoi, hailing from Alma Ata via the Moscow State Ballet, as Rosetta, his emancipated spouse. Some roles are given en travestie like the Spanish Alicia Ollata as Master of Ceremonies and the Brazilian Tatyana Cascelli as Major domo. It is a thoroughly professional ensemble, which Puttke has developed through the 13 years of his Essen ballet directorship (he has many offers to continue his career, but it seems most likely that he will start a new job as director of a newly to be established school at St. Petersburg, where he will continue as a pedagogue in the line of his adored Moscow teacher Tarasov – and thus competing with the Pushkin method, taught at the Vaganova institute). In Essen he will be succeeded next season by Ben van Cauwenbergh, who until recently has been artistic director and chief choreographer of the Wiesbaden State Theatre.
