Invasion of the Aliens

In Düsseldorf Martin Schläpfer tackles
Morton Feldman´s Beckett ´Opera´ “Neither”Ballett am Rhein
Düsseldorf Opera House
Düsseldorf, Germany
May 6, 2010

by Horst Koegler
copyright 2010 by Horst Koegler

 

At 50, Swiss Martin Schläpfer has clearly joined the front-rank of Europe´s top creative choreographers. After spending ten apprentice years as artistic director of the rather smallish Mayence company, he branched out this season, heading the much stronger Ballett am Rhein of the twin cities Düsseldorf and Duisburg. With five premieres announced for 2009/10, he managed to turn the so far rather lacklustre troupe into a beehive of dance activity. Apart from contributing about four-fifths of the repertory (eight different works) by himself, he presented works by George Balanchine, Kurt Jooss, Hans van Manen, Twyla Tharp, Paul Lightfoot and Sol Leon, plus, announced for June, the Argentinean newcomer Teresa Rotemberg.

Listing his programmes somewhat stupidly by numbers rather than by titles, he arrived at b.04 on April 30, billing Jooss´s  “Pavane for a Dead Infanta”, Tharp´s “Baker´s Dozen” and his own creation, the hour-long “Neither”, classified by its composer Morton Feldman as ´Opera in one act for Soprano and Orchestra´, with a text by Samuel Beckett. It materialized as neither an opera nor a ballet, but as a species sui generis, somewhere in between a cantata and a dance-spectacle. To me it sounded and looked like an animation performed by aliens from the galaxy, invading a continental opera-house, practising their weird rites. Maybe it announced the historical arrival of the post-Forsythian era of ballet.
It is a strange concoction. Feldman, an American composer who lived from 1926 through 87, belonging to the abstract expressionists in the wake of John Cage, wrote it 1976/77, commissioned by the opera of Rome. It is set to 87   words that Becket scribbled on a post-card. It has no action, no personalized roles and no subject matter. Though advertised as an ´opera´, Beckett as well as Feldman was convinced that by that time the genre of ´opera´ had become an impossibility.

As such it represents rather a study about futility. The words don’t add up to any literal meaning – anyway they can hardly be understood, as the soprano explores  – often by just repeating one tone - stratospheric heigths (in Düsseldorf Alexandra  Lubchansky proved an inveterate vocal stunt pilot), if she is not abetted in hushed sounds, emitted by the sizzling Düsseldorf Symphonic under Dante Anzolini.


Schläpfer fell immediately under its mind-boggling spell, calling it ´a music of gaps and thus being exactly what dance can be for me, too´. It is these ´gaps´ which he has peopled with movements, only occasionally coalescing with the notes of the music, while mostly following their own path, commenting and embroidering rather than interpreting it. I am shying away from calling it a ballet and would rather prefer to specify it as an animated installation.

It is performed by the entire company of 45, clad in silver-grey fluffy costumes, designed by rosalie, a prominent Stuttgart based  paintress and lighting designer, who is also responsible for  the back wall, suspended in the air and consisting of rows of  grey relief squares which, when lighted by Volker Weinhart, oscillate in subtle – very subtle, hardly definable colours.
 
There are scenes, vignettes, sculptures, moulded by Schläpfer in groups, often duos, trios or quartets, some in parallels, in angular and then again in reptilian shapes. They are meandering, flowing softly into each other - then again with hard sforzato stops and unending pauses, when they face each other with starring glances. There is no real continuity – it is as if animated building stones are stringed together, and there is an overall whiff of fatality – they are obviously waiting for something that never happens. There are no virtuosic feats, but rather contorted and even spastic dislocations - and then rather rare moments, as if they remember individual classroom exercises,  maybe that they have had occasionally terrestrial guest-teachers at their distant planets in outer space, who showed them what people on earth, called dancers, are practising  when asked to demonstrate the vocabulary of the école du danse. 


Few individuals emerge. There is a gaunt figure of giant size who hardly moves and yet radiates a frightening stillness. He is Jörg Weinöhl – an incredibly pliant lady in toe shoes, who stabs the floor as if she wants to drill it. Marlucia do Amaral, one of Schläpfer´s acolytes – a coloured man in white pants, with a naked torso, Chidozie Nzerem, who seems to have devoured a snake. Others, who for seconds explode like a flash of lightning, but are immersed into the crowd before one is able to identify them. There are sequences of trembling when the whole body seems to be seized by an electric bolt. It is only towards the end that all 45 dancers congregate, performing the same movements – a massed finale, which shows the impressive potential strength of the unified company.

It is an enigmatic piece, which the audience watches with unremitting candour, not knowing how to verbalize what they have seen. Years ago we had a performance of “Neither” in Stuttgart – a scenic installation by the Italian group Studio Azzurro from Milan, with the sparse audience leaving in droves. In Düsseldorf not a single person of the about 1200 present visitors dared to escape from the lasting doom. By that time they had completely forgotten the two introductory pieces by Tharp and Jooss. I wondered, though, whether Schläpfer will ever find his way back to what we call by general consent a ballet. Perhaps somebody should remind him of Balanchine and his realization after creating “Apollon musagéte”  ´that I could, for the first time, dare not use all my ideas; that I, too, could eliminate… how I could clarify, by limiting, by reducing what seemed to be myriad possibilities that is inevitable.´ 

Photos, all from Martin Schlapfer's "Neither," and all by Gert Weigeit:Ainara García Navarro, Jörg Weinöhl, Damenensemble

Maksat Sydykov, Jörg Weinöhl, Anna Tsybina, Pontus Sundset.

Ainara García Navarro, Jörg Weinöhl, Damenensemble

MARTIN SCHLÄPFER: NEITHER Ensemble FOTO Gert Weigelt