Toothache epic | Culture | EUROtoday

The Biarritz ballet returns to Madrid and to the theater that at all times hosts it and the place it often triumphs, like this Wednesday, when the general public applauded enthusiastically after the efficiency of two masterpieces of twentieth century ballet music in present variations.

Thierry Malandain (Petit-Quevilly, 1959), founder and inventive director of his ensemble, as a choreographer he stays on the margins of up to date ballet, and his invention is channeled into choral motion, nice plastic results and a sure formal bombast, or stiffness. that wishes to translate into exhibition magnificence. There is not any correctly neoclassical context, however reasonably an absorption of present modes and tendencies, searching for a particular or personal model, however on the similar time, with out disdaining one thing very French: that academic pretension that generally works properly, and generally not; Let us take into account that the 2 chosen musical works by Stravinsky had been premiered, on the time, on French soil. Being that Malandain is, a dance artist with a broad choreutical and philological tradition, he very consciously places in his works components that assist body the choreographies of a well-structured justification and introduced with polish and good dancing. The very younger squad got here out on prime. This present premiered in 2021, was dropped at Paris (Chaillot) and usually acquired reward.

Among the premieres of Bird (choreographed by Mijail Fokin) and Sacre (choreographed by Vaslav Nijinski), as creations, there are three years of distance, however relying on the place we strategy it, as aesthetic entities, there could also be many extra or rather less. The highly effective high quality and power of each scores has generated, in simply over a century, a large number of variations in probably the most various types. Making them coincide in the identical program is dangerous (the composer dreamed of it on the time, and partially achieved it, by bringing the suites from each ballets collectively in live performance). In trendy occasions, Maurice Béjart did it twice along with his personal choreographies: first on January 30, 1979 on the Palais des Sports in Paris, with Sacre and the third model of Bird danced by the twentieth Century Ballet; and a yr later on the Paris Opera with the ballet of the Parisian home (Patrick Dupond and Charles Jude alternated the position of the legendary fowl, whereas Elizabeth Platel was chosen in Sacre). This “Stravinskian-Bekhartian double program” was one of many first issues that Peter Schaufuss purchased when he took over the route of the West Berlin Opera Ballet in 1990 and loads was executed there. Now Malandain challenges destiny and resumes the mixture, however solely choreographing the primary work, the second he commissioned to somebody who was one among his line dancers.

To hearth fowl Malandain takes on the ritual half, extrapolates it from the pure surroundings of the piece, the stylized Russian folklore, and takes it to his terrain, actually combined and in a extreme design line, spiced with figures from his personal phantasmagoria. The studying of rebirth and continuation of the miracle of life, which is already within the authentic, seems once more with symbols and pantomimes. The musical model used, for which no info is given, is uncertain. The mechanics of sound amplification didn’t assist him both.

The shock on this efficiency has come from Martin Harriague (Bayonne, 1986), who began late with dance, however who has not wasted any time; He composes his music and calls himself a polymorphous choreographer. I do not know what that’s, however it sounds virtually mysterious. This is the primary work of Harriague that I’ve seen, and there’s something extra intuitive than analytical that makes me take into consideration what I’ve seen and about his future as a person ruler of our bodies and dynamic buildings; Is there a choreographer there? Definitely! Perhaps some a part of him should nonetheless free himself from the tendencies in vogue and the need to sensory exhaust the viewer, however I belief in his delicate approach of orienting himself or of referring to a previous that’s a part of his seminal lymph, and that’s the reason in his model of Sacre There is the previous man, the chosen one, the processional circle and the animistic spasm. But he may strip himself of all that to achieve himself and the spectator who awaits him. Massine watched Nijinski’s model loads earlier than making his personal, the primary in 1920, and it did not trigger a breakup. It wasn’t needed. He delicately solid a continuity and a remodeling of the obtainable components. In a way, Harriague does the identical.

Harriague makes use of the considerably hackneyed visible metaphor that, from the upright piano, the musical soul emerges, already transformed right into a choreutical physique. It’s at all times shifting to see that, even when it isn’t new. Perhaps Harriague alludes to the truth that Stravinsky composed Sacre in Les Tilleuls, a really modest boarding home in Clarens, a hamlet in Montreux close to Lake Leman, and wrote virtually the complete rating of “in a tiny room, or rather, in a kind of closet three meters by three, whose only piece of furniture “It was an upright piano that I kept muted, a table and a couple of chairs.” At the request of the landlady of the little lodge, Stravinsky’s spouse positioned some blankets on the piano harp in order that it couldn’t be heard, so he composed “the deaf one”, with out listening to himself. Stravinsky says: “The idea of The Rite of Spring It occurred to me while I was composing The fire bird. “I had dreamed a scene from a pagan ritual in which a sacrificial virgin danced to death.” It just isn’t dangerous to say that The Rite of Spring is, regardless of its theme, the primary “European” or “transrussian” by Stravinsky and that is vital when choreographing, anecdotes apart, corresponding to how he orchestrated the little prepare that took him to a close-by city to see the dentist, since this work was executed beneath the stress of a extreme toothache.