Bavarian State Ballet
Munich National Theatre, Germany
December 26, 2009
by Horst Koegler
copyright 2009 by Horst Koegler
At 52 the Valencia born Juan Ignacio Duato Bárcia, since 1990 director of the Spanish Compania Nacional de Danza, looks back on an oeuvre of 52 ballets. Educated at Rambert Ballet School in London, at Béjart´s Mudra School in Brussels and at Alvin Ailey´s New York based Dance Center, he started as a dancer with the Cullberg company in Stockholm and was there picked up by Jiri Kylián for the Netherland´s Dance Theatre. Duato created his first ballet for the company in 1984 and had his break-through as a choreographer in 1992 with “Jardi Tancat,” a work for three couples based on Catalan songs. For the Bach anniversary of 2000 he was commissioned by the city of Weimar, where Bach had spent some of the happiest years of his life as an organ-player and concert-master at the Court Chapel, to create with his Spanish dancers a Bach-ballet, which was premiered there under the title “ Diversity. Forms of Silence and Emptiness” ( its Spanish original title read “Multiplicad. Formas de silencio y vacio”) and became an international hit, produced recently by the Moscow Bolshoi Ballet and on December 23 by the Bavarian State Ballet at the Munich National Theatre.
Duato is the first Spanish choreographer of international renown with a solid classical-academic base – while all his predecessors came from the folkloric background. From his very beginnings it was clear that music served as his main inspiration, and that he used his dancers as a different group of musical instruments – like the strings, the wood-winds or the brass. Which means that he orchestrates his dances as a composer orchestrates his scores – not in the sense of painstakingly following the notes of the score, but in adding an additional bodily dimension to it. Not for him the pedantic illustration of the melodious curves of the music or its individual phrases, nor is he emphasizing its rhythmical accents, but rather in conducting a playful and civilized conversation with it. His style has been formed by the model choreographies he has danced for long years in the ballets by Kylián and Hans van Manen, with a strong dose of his Mediterranean, distinctly sensual temperament.
It's a completely unorthodox Bach ballet, as far from Balanchine´s “Concerto Barocco”, Robbins's “Goldberg Variations” or from Neumeier's “Matthaeus Passion”, let alone Amanda Miller's “Kunst der Fuge”. Instead Duato presents a catholic selection of various compositions by Bach: sonatas, dances, instrumental solo-pieces, chamber and orchestra music, and from his cantatas – 15 , including the prologue with the “Goldberg”-Aria in the first part, and 9, including a repeat of the “Aria” as epilogue in the second – with the whole performance just lasting two hours. It´s a multifaced succession of individual numbers: solos, pas de deux and de trois. small ensemble formations and large corps-groups - a hazardous mixture like a giant quilt. It has no direct anecdotal story, but the figure of Bach going through all its pieces, appropriately costumed by Duato and Imanuel Aznar: the imposing Marlon Dino as sovereign as the baroque Roi de soleil, but here now as the Roi du royaume de musique, humble but a proud serviteur of his profession. All the other dancers are dressed in leotards and tights or in black shorts and they dance in front of what looks like an organ under construction (set by Jaafar Chalabi), with small paths connecting its various levels. They dance in sneakers, not on point.
Scenes from Bach´s life are suggested rather than illustrated – more from what the theatre visitor remembers reading about him, his pupils, his family, his wife Anna Magdalena, from his being cantor of the famous boys' chorus, the Thomaner, from his virtuoso acts at the harpsichord – but all this is strictly integrated in the dances, even if he takes one of his pupils and uses her as his violoncello on which he plays (it is the delicate Giuliana Bottino, who serves here as his muse). Even if he conducts the opening chorus from the Dramma per musica “Zerreisset, zersprenget, zertrümmert die Gruft” there is no attempt to mimic the playing of instruments or vocalizing the texts – and yet one has the feeling that he is leading the Johann Sebastian Youth Orchestra and chorus – like a today Abbado is leading the forces of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra. It all seems to happen naturally, only that the dance here assumes the role of second nature. And its joyfulness is certainly contagious. So that one takes even the number 3 whirling dance of two boys in tutus with naked torsos (they are look as though they come from the “Swan Lake”–cygnettes of the Monte Carlo troupe) not at all as something frivolous, but as a jolly entertainment which Bach would have enjoyed on a nightly spree through the Leipzig gay bars of today.
Nonetheless, there is Silvia Confalonieri, who has a turbo solo to a violin sonata in which she uses her stick like a whip, a threatening creature like Carabosse, with which she lashes herself in always escalating rounds. She later puts on a mask and obviously acts as the messenger of Death (like in MacMiIllan´s “Song of the Earth”), breaking his cello-bow, while he lies outstretched on the floor. But that happens at the very end. Before there have been wonderfully varied individual dances and at the end of the first part a massive congregation of all the dancers in confronting groups which are than split up, marching against each other then again scrolled up in lines: it is choreography becoming living architecture, sculpted by a master´s hand. Dumbfounding! Like watching the erection of a cathedral from the dancers´ bodies.
In the second part the timbre changes from the carefreeness and jollifications of the beginning to a more serious, graver note, with Death (Confalonieri) clouding the happenings, the pas deux becomes more convoluted and tense. But when the finale approaches, to the repeated Aria from “Goldberg,” Duato has a truly spectacular idea: with the organ prospect only dimply lighted (by Brad Fields), he lets the whole company enter individually the set, from down right, and slowly, step by step, proceed the diagonally connected paths, so that they seem to lead heavenwards – maybe to the Kingdom of Music, high above the clouds. It looks like the reversal of the entry of the Shades in “Bayaderka”. Genial!
It is one of the happiest acquisitions of the Bavarian State Ballet – a strong accession to its imposing repertory after its creation of Jirí Kylián´s full-length “Migration Birds” of last summer and preceding William Forsythe´s (who turns sixty these days) full-length “Artifact”, announced for April. What makes me less happy is the fact that the Duato ballet and the bigger part of Forsythe´s upcoming Bach are blasted from the loudspeakers – and this in a house which is the residence of one of Germany´s top-orchestras.
There can be no doubt, though. that the Bavarian State Ballet is today one of the four leading opera ballet companies of Germany, competing with Hamburg, Berlin and Stuttgart – and the good thing is that they are all so different - Hamburg with its strong profile of Neumeier ballets, Berlin with its international mix-up of styles, and Stuttgart with its accent on creations. For its Duato-Bach the Munich dancers – who have already all Kylián. van Manen and Ek programmes in their repertory – have just to switch into their Netherland´s Dance Theatre gear. They performed the piece with such exuberant joyfulness as an act of – not homage, to Bach but like an expression of their happiness by being allowed to practice what they have chosen as their profession. Certainly a contagious affair. and thus the evening ended in perfect bliss!
Photos, all by Wilfried Hösl, from top:
Leonard Engel, Matej Urban.
Ensemble.
Giuliana Bottino, Silvia Confalonieri, Marlon Dino.
