Bovary
Dance piece by Christian Spuck based on the novel by Gustave Flaubert
Music by Camille Saint-Saëns , Thierry Pécou , György Ligeti and others
September 7th - December 25th 2024 Tickets
Polina Bovary Photo: by S. Gherciu
Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary is one of the masterpieces of world literature and points the way to literary modernism. When it was published in 1856, the French author caused a scandal. He was accused of "glorifying adultery" and of "violating public and religious morality and decency". The novel tells the story of a young woman from the country who wants more from life than the stifling provincial existence at the side of a petty-bourgeois, unambitious husband. Emma Bovary rebels against her marriage, takes lovers, loses herself in dreams of passion, luxury and debauchery - and fails. She gets hopelessly into debt, ruins her family and commits suicide by taking poison. The phenomenon of 'Bovarism', a form of denial of reality, is named after Flaubert's famous novel: Emma Bovary faces her boring life in the provinces with an exaggerated imagination, which she feeds by reading pulp novels and Parisian fashion magazines. She loves in the style of her kitschy-romantic dream worlds, lives beyond her means and loses sight of reality. On the stage and especially in ballet, Madame Bovary is a relatively rare subject, given its literary fame. Flaubert's narrative style seems too cool and too realistically detailed for a stage adaptation. But it is precisely this distanced linguistic precision combined with total devotion to the subject that inspires. The female outsider figure is at the centre of this new creation, which does not tell Madame Bovary as a conventional narrative ballet, but wants to break up the narrative structures and approach the subject with dance-like abstraction and intimate soul-searching, without losing sight of the story. Christian Spuck's dance piece Bovary is about the search for female self-determination, about intoxication and loneliness, about love surrogates, self-squandering, hedonism and where it leads when the world of dreams and reality fatally overlap. The concept of this new production for the Berlin State Ballet is to approach the literary material with dark, poetic imagery and subtle humor; to tell a story not for the sake of telling it, but to penetrate into the inner worlds of the characters and turn it into dance.
SBB Bovary Photo: by Serghei Gherciu
WORLD PREMIERE
Overture
Angels' Atlas / Overture
Choreographies by Marcos Morau and Crystal Pite
Review by Alice Heyward
Overture Photo: Serghei Gherciu
The Spanish choreographer Marcos Morau has emerged as a shooting star of the modern dance scene with his visually spectacular productions. He studied drama theory and choreography in his hometown of Valencia, as well as in Barcelona and New York, without training as a dancer himself. In 2005, he founded his own company, La Veronal, in Barcelona. With this experimental group of dancers and artists, whose members come from different arts sectors, he is a regular guest at the Tanz im August Festival in Berlin. His elaborate stage works have been shown in opera houses and theatres in Lyon, Zurich, Copenhagen and Basel, among others, and captivate audiences and the press alike. From the 2023/2024 season, he will be artist-in-residence at the Staatsballett Berlin where he will work on a new production for the first time with the Staatsballett ensemble and the Staatskapelle Berlin. Canadian dancer Crystal Pite was a member of the Ballet British Columbia and the Frankfurt Ballet under the direction of William Forsythe. She made her debut as a choreographer in 1990 with the Ballet BC. Since then, she has developed more than fifty dance pieces for the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, the Royal Ballet, the Nederlands Dans Theater I, the Cullberg Ballet and Ballet Frankfurt, among others. Her exhilarating, unconventional work has won numerous international awards, confirming her place as one of the most outstanding artists in recent dance history. Angels’ Atlas was created by Crystal Pite for the National Ballet of Canada in 2020. It unfolds in front of a constantly changing light installation – a vast, unrecognisable landscape of light and matter. Against this fantastical backdrop, dancing bodies become a sign of human transience as well as vitality. Based on commissioned music by Owen Belton and choral pieces by Peter I. Tchaikovsky and Morten Lauridsen, Angels’ Atlas is a profound work. It is arranged by Crystal Pite for a large ensemble with her usual mastery of classical and modern dance, yet she does not shy away from the challenge of making complex human issues visually and emotionally tangible.
EKMAN / EYAL
EKMAN - Lib by Jubal Battisti
EYAL Strong by Jubal Battisti
The double evening EKMAN | EYAL will be back in the Staatsballett's program from March 8, 2023. After LIB by Alexander Ekman and STRONG by Sharon Eyal, both created for the Staatsballett in 2019, were seen in combination with other productions, the original evening now returns. LIB presented the first solo dancers of the company in an unusually humorous way: clad in hairy costumes, they played with the ballet vocabulary. This season, more dancers will explore this language of movement, starting with Krasina Pavlova and Aurora Dickie.