Marco Goecke choreographs Virginia Woolf´s “Orlando”
Stuttgart Ballet
Stuttgart State Opera
Stuttgart, Germany
June 2, 2010
by Horst Koegler
copyright by Horst Koegler
Goecke, of 1972 vintage, is the other one of Stuttgart´s resident choreographers tandem (such is the beehive of the city´s choreographic talents that there are already two more waiting in the wings to demonstrate their creative potentials). But unlike Spuck (who has just been nominated as artistic director of the Zurich Ballet when Heinz Spoerli leaves after the 1911/12 season), he grew up outside of the Stuttgart Cranko orbit. He comes actually from Wuppertal, Pina Bausch´s city, was educated in Cologne, Munich and The Hague and danced with various German troupes, before joining in 2005 the Stuttgart company, since when he has been in constant demand as choreographer in Germany and abroad, including the Diamond Workshops in New York, the Jacob´s Pillow Festival and Peter Boal´s Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle. For Stuttgart he has contributed various shorter works and a highly unconventional “Nutcracker”.
His “Orlando”, though, is his most ambitious piece so far. It is in two acts and lasts, with one interval, 140 minutes. It is danced to a music collection from the oeuvre of Sir Michael Tippett, arranged by Sian Edwards, who conducted the premier, and the dramaturg Esther Dreesen-Schaback -- leading finally into the first movement of Philip Glass´s “Heroes Symphony”, based upon music by David Bowie. The first-night scored a unanimous success –- and for once proved Sir Michael, whose dance contributions have been so far some rare additions to his operas (for instance in “The Midsummer Marriage”, which was choreographed by John Cranko in 1955 at Covent Garden) as a genuine ballet composer. In any case it proved an ´event´ of international rank. The other surprise was the promotion of Friedemann Vogel, its 31-year-old protagonist, one of the company´s principals (nominated for this year´s Prix Benois, but couldn´t compete because of the enormous demands of his role as Orlando) to superstar status.
Its plot, deftly condensed by Dreesen-Schaback from the biographical novel of Virginia Woolf, deals with the story of a young noble man, Orlando, born into the Elizabethan age and courted by the withering queen. He has a violent love affair with Sasha, a Russian princess in the entourage of the Russian ambassador, against the background of the Great Frost, but after her departure falls destitute and starts resuming work on the poem “The Oak”, which he tries in vain to get published. Sent as an ambassador to Constantinople, he gets involved in civil unrest and murderous riots and falls for a lengthy period asleep, from which he awakes, having been metamorphosed in a woman´s body. As Lady Orlando he escapes, returns to England, relishes discovering his female traits, continuing life during the 18th and 19th century, without aging beyond thirty, meeting famous poets, finishing her work of “The Oak Tree” and publishing it in 1928, when she marries a sea captain, and prays to the moon.
Dreesen-Schaback has condensed it as a succession of scenes, cut in quick sequences like film sketches, with Woolf's characters putting up short appearances, peopling them with all sorts of weird existences, crooks and scoundrels, but also of loving creatures like the final Marmaduke Shelmerdine, whom she marries. It is full of ironic commentaries and topical references of the literary Bloomsbury circle, of which Woolf was one of its most prominent members. The general tone is of a dancelike, almost dreamy lightness and humorous gaiety and offers a pattern of all sorts of episodes, solos and pas de deux, of small and big ensembles, slow-motion meditations and avalanching formations, which one experiences like being catapulted in turbo speed through four centuries in a time-tunnel. It helps if one knows the original plot with its wealth of eccentrics, but it is not really necessary as so much happens that one´s mind is kept busy throughout its almost two and a half hours in trying to identify who is who. It is one of those ballets which ask the active participation of the public´s imagination.
Most choreographers, I guess, would have arranged this as a journey through ballet-history from Elizabethan times through the early 20th century – with lots of references to historical sources from the social and ballroom dances of England in Shakespearean times via the ballets de la cour in France and the opera ballets of the 19th century through the beginnings of modern dance in the early decades of the 20th century, performed to appropriate music. Not so with Goecke, who has shunned all historical references –- with only slight accents in the costumes and mostly extravagnt hat designs by Michaela Springer, who is also in charge of the set. But there is practically no set –- the stage is empty, surrounded by darkly coloured walls, with the lights (by Udo Haberland) evoking the changes of atmosphere. There is one single piece of décor, the oak tree at the beginning and the end.
Nor does Goecke borrow from the vocabulary of the danse d´école,. Rather, he has invented his own sort of choreography, based on minimized motions, which set the whole body quivering, as if charged with electricity. The arms are in perpetual motion, ploughing through the air, like the rotators of a paddle-steamer, and yet they form beautifully plasticized sculptures. Bodies are under nervous tension, so that their skin looks like gleaming from goose-pimples if not from glow-worms, as if the skin is illuminated from within. It is this constant flow of energy which tempts me to describe it not in matters of the normal ballet-language as steps or pas than comparing them to electronic pixels. Gestures are tender and hesitant and no pantomime et al, and yet they can express the most intimate feelings, as in the slow-motion coming together of Orlando and Sasha while ice-skating on the frozen Thames (without the customary references to Ashton´s “Les Patineurs”), culminating in what seems to be the longest kiss in ballet-history, qualifying for an entry in the Guinness Book of Records. With the simplest means maximum effects are achieved –- for instance the sailing away of the Russian fleet by handling small white paper strips. It´s incredibly beautiful – also when scribbled pieces of paper rain down from the flies. Without having seen it, you cannot imagine how Goecke builds up extremely long passages of a pas de deux, which seem to last for hours and yet being without a second too long (for instance in the encounter of Orlando and the spinsterish Queen Elizabeth I.). Pure magic is exorcised by the switching on of flashlights.
In this tapestry of motions characters are finely penciled or painted in bold brush-strokes, for instance the two rivaling females, the crocklike bald queen of Alicia Amatrirain or the sinuously waving Sasha, Princess of Russia, the sexy Katja Wünsche. There is the slimy pamphleteer Nicholas Greene of Damiano Pettenella or the fantastic androgyn Duchesse Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aahorn and Scand-op-Boom who becomes Archduke Harry, a multiple person rolled into one, performed by Douglas Lee, otherwise Stuttgart´s prime Apollo, who here transvestites all hermaphrodites –- even a dog appears in the body of Sebastian Schwab, an actor from the drama-department of the State Theatre. And then there is this loving alter ego of Orlando, the captain Shelmerdine, who seems to amalgamate with Orlando and thus finally to discover his true identity, thus freeing him from his writers' block, so that he can finish his great poem “The Oak Tree” – a role specially modeled upon William Moore, one of Goecke´s favourite Stuttgart dancers.
The corps represents all sorts of folks whether they be the courtiers of Westminster or the flamboyant gypsies of Constantinople, while I have failed to identify the men with tufts on their heads, so that they look like delegates fom Macbeth´s Woods of Burnham or the three Allegories of Rachele Buriassi, Myriam Simon and Alessandra Tognoloni, who, on points and with their tutus suggest that they might have escaped from the family of “Sleeping Beauty” fairies. Here Goecke and his dramaturg Dreesen-Schaback have obviously continued where Virginia Woolf had finished.
As they have had the genial idea – together with their musical advisor, the conducting Sian Edwards - to add as their finale the first movement from Philip Glass´s “Heroes Symphony. The Light”, based on David Bowie – thus landing Orlando in ”Ziggy Stardust” androgynous landscape. It is here that Orlando finally finishes his travel through the centuries, which Friedemann Vogel had started almost motionless, sitting in the shadow of the giant oak tree, frustrated by being unable to continue with the poem he has started to write. He sits there like a sculpted figure, for endless minutes not moving at all, until he at long, long last starts to move his fingers, from which the movement gradually flows through his body, his motions getting freer and freer. absorbing all the experiences of his life, until finally exploding in the jubilant harmonies of Philip Glass, catapulting him through the air, another Ariel, fed by the energy which he himself generates by his working mind. Accepting himself as a man, the richer because he has assimilated his female leanings and thus returned to the unique status God created him before splitting him up as man or wife. It is the greatest role the contemporary ballet offers any dancer, and Friedemann Vogel performs it as if he had specially been created for it by Apollo!
Photos:
Alicia Amatriain and
Friedemann Vogel. (c) Ulrich Beuttenmüller
Friedemann Vogel and William Moore. (c) Ulrich Beuttenmüller
Friedemann Vogel. (c)
Regina Brocke