In the Wake of Dante´s "Divina commedia“ and Kafka´s “Metamorphosis”
For the 20th anniversary of the Bavarian State Ballet Jirí Kylián choreographed “Zugvögel” (“Migration Birds”) as Danzas apocalypticas
Bavarian State Ballet
National Theatre
Munich, Germany
May 3, 2009
by Horst Koegler
copyright @ 2009 by Horst Koegler
Studying in the ballet classes of the Prague conservatory with the highly venerated former Czech ballerina Zora Semberová (Prokofiev´s first Juliet in the 1938 Brno first performance of “Romeo and Juliet”), Jirí Kylián (born in 1947) and Ivan Liská (of 1950 vintage) were lucky enough to escape Czechoslovakia just before the Communist political powers crashed what had so hopefully begun as the “Prague Spring” of 1968 to study with a scholarship at the London Royal Ballet School. From there they progressed to their first professional engagements in Germany – with Kylián joining the young company John Cranko was just establishing at Stuttgart, while Liska started with the Düsseldorf company, from where he went to Munich, to finally being engaged as a principal by John Neumeier in Hamburg, becoming soon his first protagonist, creating dozens of roles from “St. Matthew Passion” through Peer Gynt. Kylián started to choreograph in Stuttgart, proceeding to The Hague, building the Netherland´s Dans Theatre together with Hans van Manen into one of the most creative troupes of the continent – later adding the NDT II for young dancers on the brink of their career, and even later the NDT III for a group of seniors in their early sixties. With the 1999/2000 season Kylián relinquished his directorial obligations, but continues to choreograph as a freelancer and thus was able to accept an invitation by his former pal Liska, who is now in his tenth year as artistic director of the Munich based Bavarian State Ballet. Following in the footsteps of its founding director Konstanze Vernon, Liska has honed it into Germany´s number one classically based company with an admirable repertory of Petipa classics, not only the three Tchaikovskys plus “Don Quixote” and “Raymonda”, but also a beautifully crafted “La Bayadère” and the highly entertaining “Le Corsaire”.
For 2008/9 Liska concentrated on the 100th anniversary of the Diaghilev Ballets Russes, starting with new productions of Fokine´s “Sheherazade” plus Nijinska´s “Les Biches” and the creation of newcomer Terence Kohler´s “Once Upon an Ever After” (to Tchaikovskys ´Symphonie pathétique´). He has now followed this by inviting Kylián for another creation in the best of Diaghilev fashion: “Zugvögel” (alias “Migration Birds), while for the Gala Performance of this year´s Munich Ballet Festival Week he built the programme around three different versions of “L´après-midi d´un faune”: the reconstructed original Nijinsky of 1912 (danced by Munich´s own principal Tigran Mikayelyan - one of those miracle boys coming for the Yerevan school), then the Jerome Robbins “Afternoon of a Faune” (touchingly rendered by Vladimir Malakhov and Polina Semionova from the Berlin State Ballet) and John Neumeier´s rather extravagant realisation as a pas de trois (with Hamburg´s Otto Bubenicek as the center of Hèlène Bouchet´s and Edvin Revazov´s erotic desires). But then the whole Gala programme was centered on celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Diaghilev Ballets Russes Paris debut in 1909 – with excerpts from “Swan Lake” (Irina Dvorenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky from ABT) and “Sleeping Beauty” (with Munich´s Lisa-Maree Cullum in the ´Rose Adage`), Fokine´s “Firebird” pas de deux ( Mara Galeazzi and Thiago Soares from the Royal Ballet) and “Spectre de la rose” (with Jana Selina and Igor Kolb from St. Petersburg´s Mariinsky Ballet), Massine´s amusing “Parade”, charmingly reconstructed for the Saarbrücken based Donlon Dance Company, Balanchine´s dehydrated “Apollo” version (Alexander Sergeyev, Selina, Anastasia Nikitina and Ekaterina Osmolkina, all from St.Petersburg) and Kohler´s Munich made “Once Upon an Ever After”. Thus over the months Munich got to see a lot of the Diaghilev repertory. carefully revived for the Bavarian State Ballet and stretched to include two creations, Made in 2009, the Kohleer and the Kylián – definitely a program, Diaghilev would have approved of if he had been present at Munich´s 2009 Ballet Festival Week – a 137 years old senior guest of honour (now try to imagine this)!
Anyway “Zugvögel” proved the most substantial creation of the German 2008/9 season. On the programme it was just announced as ´Uraufführung` (alias ´Creation mondiale´) Jirí Kylián for Sabine (Kylian´s wife Sabine Kupferberg). Artistic Overall Production and Choroeography by Jirí Kylián, followed by a team of twenty artistic collaborators – mostly known from his former work, and responsible for music, stage/light, costumes, voice, sub-stage installation, film, camera and projections in the auditory of the Munich National Theatre (the city´s State Opera House) plus four ballet-masters from the Bavarian State Ballet.
Only then follows the list of performers, headed by Caroline Geiger and Peter Jolesch as the elder couple (originally including Kupferberg, but then she hurt herself and was to be replaced by Geiger, while she appeared on the pre-shot film sequences). Apart from the rather extensive four film inserts (concentrating on a model of the National Theatre, placed on the beach, splashed by the waves of the ocean and inhabited by Kupferberg as an elderly dancer musing about her past and confronted with her appearance as an innocent younger girl, performed by Richelle Plantinga – she even enters the box-like model theatre and we watch her strolling through the corridors and floors and the auditory of the house).
And what do all these hordes of people, appearing in an incessant stream of scenes (without interval), dancing and performing on screens and under waves of cloth (on which play the lights), with the model theatre finally exploding in flames, and projected nude dancers flying skywards – what does it all amount to? Kylián refuses to categorize it – so I wouldn´t dare to call it a ballet, a play, a spectacle, a production, a mystery. though it contains elements of all of these, always yielding into extended stretches of snowballing dances, until the whole stage gets flooded with dozens of waltzing couples in a squaldron like being boilt in a sort of holocaust, emanating from the apocalyptic sounds of Ravel´s “La Valse”. A mystical apocalyptic play?
I am not entirely happy about the title “Zugvögel”. It starts one hour before the proper stage performance begins, with an invitation to the audience, to join the group wandering about the cave of the under-stage, the ´belly´of the theatre, the machinery room, the shafts and the niches, inhabited by the now dead creatures who formerly worked there, birds, monsters, ogres and other living stock – now banished to the underworld, reminding me sort of the damned souls in Dante´s inferno of his “Divina commedia”. Wandering around we face the lights again when we arrive at the proper stage, with the house slowly filled with the arriving visitors, with with projections of thousands of flattering seagulls, dangerously threatening the audience to any monment attacking them Hitchcock-like. The dancers now occupy the stage, and we may have landed in Dante´s purgatory. There happens a lot of dancing in Kylián´s accustomed energetic and aggressive style, propelling the bodies in diagonal slashes, bulding up twisted sculptures, sometimes looking rather weird, that in beautiful symmetries. New are the dekicate finger danings of the elderly couple. Most bizarre are the balloon dancers, with huge sail-like constructions (making them look like modern descents for Leonardo da Vinci´s flight machines)s, fastoned on ther backs, billowing in the air, inflated with helium gas, hardly working on their legs, but instead being blown in the air. They resemble giant cockcroacches which occupy most of the of the huge stage space – maybe they are spiders, their Japanes designer calls them ´blown up cloaks´ (Reminding me somewhat of the clouds Warhol once designed for Cunningham). Later on two boys appear, their backs strepped with pliant reeds, on which are fastened four pillows, which perform their own moevements high up in the air. They look like heirs of Schlemmer´s ´Bauhaus´- creations for the “Triadic Ballet”. Being constantly on the move, the stage gets littered by an incredible mix of styles. among which the elderly couple emerge like Philemon and Baucis from a different age. The beings inhabiting this cosmos steadly changing their appearance like in Kafka´s (and one must not forget that Kylián hails fom Kafka´s city Prague) “Metamorphosis”. It is really like Dante, William Blake, Lautréamont and the Angels of the apocalypse, all rolled into one.
Kylián justifies the title by comparing the theatre to a house with open windows through which there is a constant coming and going of people who leave their traces once they have worked there. and thus becomes a “Temple of muses… with its walls imbued by the passion and the perspirations of the singers, musicians and dancers, which bring to life the stage, but also of painters, sculpturs, architects, engineers plus generations of craftsmen who see that the factory of illusions for moments becomes true….. Like all of us, who fly like ´migration birds´ through the theatre, whether as spectators or protagonists. Which makes no great difference.We all live and work under one roof, under the roof of a theatre, which from time to time offers the possibility to reflect the past, to meditate about the future and to brood over the permanently fading presence” (Kylián)
It is a giant enterprise – something like the legendary productions of Max Reinhardt or the pageants staged by the Soviet revolutionaries of the ´Theatre October, during the early Soviet decades, requiring a strategist´ rather than a single choreographer or producer/director – actually a super-Diaghilev who has absorbed all the technical means which have developed and shaped the world during the eighty years which have passed since Diaghilev´s death in 1929, And Kylián handles them magisterially, inspiring his cohorts of collaborators, both of his staff and the meber of the Bavarina State Ballet with a creative furor which I cannot remember of any other theatrical event I have witnessed through during recent years, And the dancers of the Bavarian State Ballet – apart from their ailing prima Lucia Lacarra – whether principals or eleves, respond to Kylián´s challenging demands with an artistic-technical expertise which catapults the Bavarians directly among the frontrank of international companies.
