Overture / Angels' Atlas
Choreographies by Marcos Morau and Crystal Pite
by Alice Heyward
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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