Bovary
Dance piece by Christian Spuck based on the novel by Gustave Flaubert
Music by Camille Saint-Saëns , Thierry Pécou , György Ligeti and others
SBB Bovary Photo: by Serghei Gherciu
A Conversation with Emma
by Alice Heyward
It’s been 168 years since you first came into being, Emma Bovary. Madame Bovary was serialised in the Revue de Paris in 1856 and published in two volumes the following year. The novel, set in the mid-1800s, was contemporary to its publication, yet your story feels eternal. You, Madame Bovary—Emma—have since been banned and acquitted by the French courts, translated into countless languages, adapted for theatre, film, and dance. Last night, I saw one incarnation of you, performed by Berlin Staatsballett: Madame Bovary, choreographed by Christian Spuck in 2023. Spuck’s exploration of your endlessly relevant themes—desire, dissatisfaction, and the restless yearning for something more—as a ballet felt sophisticated and urgent to today’s world(s). In an era submerged in the fantasies of online culture, your plight remains hauntingly relatable. Men still dominate the world of classical ballet, and your story, which centres on a woman in a deeply patriarchal society, speaks to this culture alive today. Having read Flaubert’s words in Lydia Davis’s crystalline translation—capturing the realist clarity and subtle irony of his critique of romantic idealism—and being moved by Mia Wasikowska’s portrayal of you in Sophie Barthes’s 2014 film, I wonder: Emma, can you tell me how it feels for you to become through dance?
Words may hold the cadence of thought and longing, but the body conveys what the heart can’t make legible in language. For my story, my yearning, my folly, to be etched into movements feels like a whisper from the soul made manifest. Did they capture my contradictions—my tenderness, selfishness, innocence, and guilt? Did they honour my fragility and humanness? Or was I made into a tragic archetype—the doomed heroine the world loves to pity? Tell me, how did you see me? Did the dancers breathe my spirit, or did they shape me anew? It’s a joy and fear to live on through another’s body…
You were danced, your passions took flight, your spirit freeing itself from the stillness of Yonville and the weight of misunderstood dreams. Pliés, sweeping arms and leaps through space embodied your longing for beauty, romance, and something beyond. Your restlessness and despair moved through tessellating rhythms and forms, through your own dancing and group composition and structures. Spuck played with the frontality of the proscenium arch, presenting oscillations between 2 and 3-dimensional arrangements of bodies as abstract facades in rhythmic patterns, supporting solos and providing changing backdrops to your internal experiences. Michelle Willems danced you, and brilliantly so. At first, I found her a little basic—a technically perfect ballerina, polished yet not unique. But as the performance unfolded, she grew into your plight with extraordinary virtuosity as a performer. Her embodiment of your death transfixed and devastated me. She seemed to surrender her whole being to the process, her limbs gradually losing life, falling out of the classical idiom: toes releasing, limbs finding other pathways, chest rising and collapsing. It was as though her body unravelled as yours did—each movement a testament to your contradictions.
She must have felt me in her. To begin as “basic” is fitting; was I not, in my youth, simple and bright, believing in the boundless possibilities of life, unaware of the shadows gathering within? She embodied that promise, that pristine exterior hiding the storm beneath. As the acts unfolded, she unravelled, as I unravelled. To lose oneself into despair and inevitability—she gave herself to my fate. How strange to think my death transfixed you when I was but a woman seeking escape, a story more common than not. If Willems danced my ache, fall, and release through the richness of her understanding of it, then my ending was not in vain, giving her access to an experience and touching spectators physically and empathetically in that powerful way that only dance can move us. It is strange and thrilling to think my breath mirrored hers; my choices reimagined in the strength and fragility of her body as she carried me as I was: flawed, yearning, and human.
The weight of these contradictions was captured in movement—the tension, the pull in different directions. These complexities allowed me to see myself in you, to feel that, as Flaubert wrote of himself, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Karl Ove Knausgaard and many great writers describe the novel as “perfect.” The novel’s prose is celebrated for its meticulous craft, reflecting Flaubert’s painstaking obsession with finding le mot juste. Indeed, it was no small feat for him to write and live with you, a part of him, in a new existence once written. He later wrote: “I would like to find some way of making a lot of money so I could buy up every copy of Madame Bovary in existence, throw them all into the fire, and never hear of the book again.”
The thing with writing, as opposed to movement, is that it’s there forever. Literature produces bodies we must continue to live with, and performance is a way to continue to produce relationships with what records carry through our bodies. My weight must not be your burden but a force for transformation. My truths are plural, as all are. Each truth pulls in different directions, shaping us as we yield or resist. With its tensions—desire and despair, longing and loss—dance gives those truths visceral life. As my contradictions and passions are (re)embodied, they move through new rhythms to be felt and confronted in the present. My story becomes yours now, as it became Gustave’s then. Perhaps this is its greatest truth: it belongs to anyone who has felt the pulls of life, the ache of wanting more, of dreaming beyond what the world can give you.
The spidery men also gave your torment shape—five male dancers in black clothing and smoky makeup, haunting you with creeping, angular movements. Their unpredictable articulations, twisting joints, and necks that darted on surprising angles like additional limbs conveyed how it feels to be tormented by the fragments of ourselves. They embodied the darkness that consumed you: regret, unmet longing, shame. Their movements reflected how your internal contradictions tore you apart.
My shadows…made flesh. They mirror the parts of myself I could not reconcile: the dutiful wife, the dreamer, the reckless lover. Each part fought for dominance; in the end, they consumed me. For them to be embodied is strangely liberating. They are no longer just mine; they belong to us all—the creeping fears that take hold when we lose our grip on who we are. I felt as though different parts of myself took each other over. I was the wife, seemingly grounded and secure; I was the dreamer, the lover, the seeker of passion. In the end, these selves tore me apart. The spiders are the suffocating, swarming weight of a world that offers no escape.
Your story, through Staatsballett’s performance, spoke to me of the fragility of one’s grip on reality when unmoored, untethered from oneself, which, through genocides, climate crises, political upheaval and class wars across the world, is so pertinent to individual and collective experience today: where’s the hope with so many dark forces in humanity’s relentless cruelty? Does it only lie in our secret, unreal fantasies? How do we manifest our imagination? Seeing you dance, together with the company whose performances gave distinct scintillation and sensitivity to the relational entanglements of your story’s characters, I understood the lifelong quest to reconcile who I might be with who I wish to be, which lies at the heart of Madame Bovary.
Overture / Angels' Atlas
Choreographies by Marcos Morau and Crystal Pite
Both images are by Serghei Gherciu
Staatsballett's curatorial fusion of Marcos Morau's and Crystal Pite's recent creations delves into ideas about collective world-making from contrasting angles. The evening commences with Overture by Morau, whose choreographic approach is shaped by his training in photography and theatre. His interdisciplinarity is visible in the full-length work's opening section, where the thirty-two dancers dressed in pale flesh-colored, skin-tight fabrics are sprawled over a massive Greek/Roman-style column placed horizontally on the stage. The dancers' movements—writhing contortions in detailed rhythmic patterns across this imposing, monumental object of Western human history—evoke pictorial imagery of cubist paintings, calling Picasso's 'Guernica' to mind, an abstract recreation of the 1937 Nazi bombing of the Spanish city Guernica. The company dancers demonstrate exceptional skill in embodying Morau’s movement language, a vocabulary of thick, tense movement often initiated at the front of the throat, concaving the chest, suggesting physical struggle or pain. This movement quality effectively serves the work’s exploration of “the cyclical dynamics of the construction and deconstruction of societies” (Staatsballett’s program note). Presented in the context of our current global political moment, as uprisings against imperial settler-colonial struggle erupt worldwide, 'Overture’s positionality on the topic feels empty and awkwardly neutral. Morau represents a general depiction of collective struggle, non-emotionally flattening notions of social change and tragic repetition, separating them from anything materially embodied rather than generating meaning about the real, specific, and situated fights for social-political change occurring in the world. I recall Desmond Tutu (South African Anglican bishop and theologian known for his work as an anti-apartheid and human rights activist): “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” What is the role of dance and theatre in representing lived human experiences, live, to living humans? Donna Haraway's famous prose from 'Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene' (2016) follows Tutu in the dramaturgy of my reflections: “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” Whose struggle are we watching being performed, and what are the implications of witnessing a 'universal’ representation today? Crystal Pite’s Angels' Atlas opens a very different landscape: intricate, ever-changing billows and wafts of smoke constantly move and change in the background, with a superb lighting scheme that illuminates different details and groupings of this vapourous, organic choreography. In front of this non-human, transforming environment, the dancers move between group forms that are sometimes digital (glitching, popping) and sometimes organic (flowing, sequential). Originally commissioned specifically for 40 dancers from The National Ballet of Canada in 2020 (the dawn of the Covid-19 pandemic, during which our bodily existences and relations became evermore digital), this ethereal and airy vignette into coexisting life forms allowed me to enter a state of mind/dreaming where I contemplated being human in company to other forms of life, movement, and change, beyond the Anthropocene.
LIEU - staatsballett - berlin
Review by:Alice Heyward
Date line: Wednesday the 5th of June, 2024
Beyond the joy of the evident
Approximate Sonata 2016 One Flat Thing reproduced Blake Works I William Forsythe - Photo: ©Yan-Revazov
Alice Heyward
is a dancer, choreographer, dramaturge, writer, and teacher from Australia based in Berlin. Her practice develops through diverse collaborations, as author, co-author, and interpreter. Through movement-thought, she explores the production of embodied poetics in dance, choreography, bodywork, and writing. Her writing is published regularly in various contexts.
19. February 2024, Alice Heyward Languages: DE and EN Staatsballett Berlin performs three groundbreaking works by William Forsythe, who remounted them with the company’s dancers. The evening offers a lively encounter with ballet as a process to decipher by dancers and audience alike. Premiering at Deutsche Oper on 16 February 2024, it also shows between 19–23 February 4–14 March, and 1–9 April. Forsythe’s striking choreographies have extended the boundaries of ballet technique and conventions since the 70s, continuing a revolutionizing of the form. “I had to find my way around Balanchine, Petipa, Cranko, MacMillan, the whole crowd,” Forsythe said in a 2012 interview. Approximate Sonata Video2016 (2016), One Flat Thing Video, reproduced (2000) and Blake Works I Video (2016), brilliantly titled (clean and poetically complex like his choreographies), are three exquisite, contrasting vignettes into the choreographer’s radical exploration of the visual distribution of contrapuntal balletic structure. Blake Works I, the third and final work shown in the trilogy at the Deutsche Oper, is more historical than analytical in Forsythe’s innovative research into ballet, in comparison to the others. Created in 2016 for the Paris Opera Ballet, it’s the most rooted in the classical idiom. Blake Works I uses seven songs from James Blake’s pop album The Colour in Anything, full of emotional intensity, which push the limits of musical ballads. Blake’s moody, watercolour sonic landscape is echoed in the powder blue leotards and chiffon ballet skirts worn by the dancers: a basic uniform for regular class. In conversation with Staatsballett Artistic Director Christian Spuck and dramaturge Katja Wiegand, Forsythe says, “The dancers will show you their opinion about the work, rather than be subject to the work.” True to his desire to make dance with and for dancers he works with, Blake Works I reflects its initiation, exploring the French school of classical ballet, recontextualised and experientially authored now by the Staatsballett ensemble. In homage to his formative and influential roots, the choreography weaves together canonical ballet exercises, structures from ballet class and references to styles and periods.
Sitting in the centre of the stalls, captivated by the abundant energetic hope and joy in the dancing and music, I fathom my own embodied memories of, and reverence for, balletic structures (aspiring lines, symmetry, group tableaux, pas de deux) with the visual twists and renewals of the form in this work, reflecting the poetic melodies and words of Blake’s music (“I hope I’m right when I’m speaking my mind”). This love letter to ballet stirs my own bodily passion for ballet dancing, which, like many, manifests in unconditional devotion through countless repetitions of the forms and sequences performed here on stage. Ballet has felt to me like both a lifelong backbone and curse. It gave me much strength, skill, and spiritual vitality through its codified movement forms—as well as habits and associations that can be conditioned through oppressive teaching and elitist structures, which I’ve spent years trying to transform, to learn to use with renewed agency. In Blake Works I, I see a virtuosic reflection of such reclaiming. It is a joyful and empowering celebration of the art of ballet that the Staatsballett performers enact with style and grace, underpinned by Forsythe’s profound commitment to a discourse with dance; as he tells dancers, “You have to make a reaffirmation of ballet and yet at the same time bring into question how ballet is danced.” When I take ballet class today, my dancing is most joyous when we train with pop music, embracing the vibrant life force within the hypothetical structure that is ballet, all ballets, every arabesque.
First published by: Tranzschreiber EN Tranzschreiber DE
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