Antony Tudor is one of the most important renewers of classical ballet in the 20th century. He was born in London in 1908, was enthusiastic about dance from an early age and was finally admitted into the class of Marie Rambert at the age of 19. In 1930 he joined her legendary company as dancer, secretary and assistant, and began to devise his own choreographies. In the British dance scene which in the 1930s was largely dominated by the aestheticism of the Ballets Russes and the expressionist dance of the German Kurt Jooss who had emigrated to London in 1934, Tudor was able to compete successfully with Frederick Ashton as a driving force through three widely differing works – “Jardin aux lilas” (1936), “Dark Elegies” (1937) and “Judgment of Paris” (1938). He understood how to transform the means of classical ballet into a dance language in which the performer is a depicter, and human experience as expressed in dance became the focal point. Once again he worked close beside a great personality of classical dance, George Balanchine, and found his definitive artistic home in the newly founded American Ballet Theater in New York, for which he created numerous choreographies, among them also his last great work dedicated wholly to pure neo-classical style, “The leaves are fading” (1975).

“When he choreographed, he united the essence of every movenment in his whole being, in his eyes, his back, his hands”, was how Gelsey Kirkland described working with Tudor. He created for this famous American ballerina and Jonas Kage as her partner the central pas-de-deux in “The leaves are fading” which will open the multiple bill b.14 at Ballett am Rhein. An elegiac duo far removed from the world, speaking of an unconditional and unselfish confidence between two people, a man and a woman.

 
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THE LEAVES ARE FADING - PAS DES DEUX
Antony Tudor

MUSIC
No.8 of “The Cypresses,12 short movenments for string quartet” WoO B152 by Antonín Dvořák, arranged for strings
 

Choreographie Antony Tudor
Musikalische Leitung Wen-Pin Chien
Bühne und Kostüme Thomas Ziegler
Licht John B. Read
Einstudierung Kirk Peterson
 
Pas de deux Ann-Kathrin Adam, Helge Freiberg
Orchester Duisburger Philharmoniker
 

Frederick Ashton’s “Five Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan” are a miniature, but what a miniature! In honour of the significant pathfinder of modern dance Isadora Duncan, the Briton wrote this solo to five Brahms waltzes from op.39 and dedicated them to a no less significant ballerina, Lynn Seymour, who in her turn will be a guest at Ballett am Rhein to prepare Ashton’s choreography for the b.14 multiple bill.

To this day Isadora Duncan’s name has a magic aura, taking us back as it does to the beginning of expressionist dance, without however assuming any definite form in our eyes. Apart from a few photographs and sketches and writings by or about her, we do not really have anything to draw on which can help us to reconstruct her dancing. Isadora Duncan dreamed of a renewal of ballet out of the spirit of antiquity, a bodily resuscitation of the “world of Greek imagination” of Walter Pater with the means of the so transient art of dance and the rediscovery of a sensuality which had fallen into disuse. Barefoot, in a tunic which simultaneously veiled and suggested, she left all convention far behind in her performances, and shook the foundations of more than just classical ballet.

Frederick Ashton – a Briton trained by Léonide Massine and Marie Rambert, who was for many years the dominating influence over English dance with his elegantly lyrical style determined by great clarity and musicality - was so fascinated by the American Isadora Duncan’s appearances that finally he set a monument to her with choreography of his own. Using the waltz no.15 from op.39 of Brahms, to which she herself had often danced, he devised for Lynn Seymour a first solo which was performed at a Hamburg gala in 1975; a year later he added another four of the waltzes to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Ballet Rambert. To his own personalized recollections of Isadora Duncan he added contemporary reports and written memories by Marie Rambert, and thus compiled a ballet which is at once homage, reconstruction, recall and new creation, danced double-exposure history and at the same time enormously living stage artistry: the reflection of Frederick Ashton in the light of the art of Isadora Duncan’s dance.
 
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FIVE BRAHMS WALTZES IN THE MANNER OF ISADORA DUNCAN
Frederick Ashton

MUSIC
waltzes Nos. 1, 2, 8, 10, 13 and 15 out of op.39 by Johannes Brahms Choreography Frederick Ashton
 

Choreographie Frederick Ashton
Einstudierung Lynn Seymour
Licht John B. Read
Klavier Dirk Wedmann
 
Solistin Camille Andriot
 

A woman reaches out her hand towards a man. He comes to her, takes her and breaks her like a flower. He wants to own her, to make her his property, but Caroline loves another …

Out of this classical triangle situation – love which hopes for fulfilment in vain and in the end is repulsed and destroyed – Antony Tudor in 1936 created his masterpiece “Jardin aux lilas” out of a vision of a fragrant lilac garden to the ultra-romantic music of Ernest Chausson’s “Poème” for violin and orchestra. In the manner of a psychological study, it is not the superficial story which is the kernel, but the inner motivation of the characters and the sounding of actions and desires under the compulsions of society in Edwardian England.

Unlike his contemporary George Balanchine, Antony Tudor was not in search of abstract dance figures. but was intensively concerned with the development of wholly individual and novel physical expression which on the surface seems to be unconscious and reflexive, but conceals behind it a perpetual search for truth. “Every pose, every gesture is full of extreme expression, without loss of the classical line thereby”, Jochen Schmidt writes. “In reconciling expression and form Tudor attained incomparable mastery in his best work.” – a melancholic, dreamladen array of the romantic love felt by young people.

 
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JARDIN AUX LILAS
Antony Tudor

MUSIC
“Poème“ for violin and orchestra op.25 by Ernest Chausson
 

Choreographie Antony Tudor
Musikalische Leitung Wen-Pin Chien
Bühne und Kostüme Thomas Ziegler
Licht John B. Read
Einstudierung Donald Mahler
 
Solo-Violine Natasha Korsakova
Caroline, die Braut Nicole Morel
Ihr Liebhaber Alexandre Simões
Der Mann, den sie heiraten muss Andriy Boyetskyy
Eine Episode aus dessen Vergangenheit Julie Thirault
Freunde und Verwandte Doris Becker, Carolina Francisco Sorg, Anne Marchand, Anna Tsybina, Jackson Carroll, Philip Handschin, Bruno Narnhammer, Boris Randzio
Orchester Duisburger Philharmoniker
 

The assembly of his fourteenth première at his Ballett am Rhein meant for Martin Schläpfer a glance back – not only in ballet history, but also in his own biography. Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, Lynn Seymour – names which made him remember his own time in London during his training at the Royal Ballet School in 1977/78, during which he did not only intensively study the work of these choreographers, but also could experience at first hand an utterly fascinating and inspiring closeness to the stars of the Royal Ballet – among them Lynn Seymour.

The composer Johannes Brahms wrote his 2nd Symphony in 1877 during a stay at his beloved Pörtschach on the Wörthersee. From the beginning the composition was regarded as a carefree orchestral idyll, a sort of pendant to Beethoven’s “Pastorale”. Theodor Billroth, a friend of Brahms, wrote about it: “This is blue skies everywhere, babbling brooks, sunshine and cool green shade!” That is, a symphony as a portrait of nature? The beginning with the natural horn tones, the bucolic woodwind which states the first theme, the string cantilenas which lend the work its warm sound, or the pastoral flutes and oboes – all this supports such an estimation, by which however one should not let oneself be too easily misled, warned the otherwise somewhat taciturn Brahms in advance about his “new lovely monster”.

Martin Schläpfer sees his new ballet to Brahms’s Symphony no.2 in D major op.73 as a sort of gesture of solidarity, in that he chimes in with the late-romantic character already established by the five waltzes of the same composer played earlier on the same evening to another ballet. But at the same time the choice of this score means for him a new step in his ambition to come to terms with the large-scale dimensions of symphonic architecture and their capacity to nourish a choreographic art which again and again derives its energy from music.

 
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JOHANNES BRAHMS - SYMPHONIE NR. 2 (Uraufführung)
Martin Schläpfer

MUSIC
Symphony no.2 in D major op.73 by Johannes Brahms
 

Choreographie Martin Schläpfer
Musikalische Leitung Wen-Pin Chien
Bühne und Kostüme Keso Dekker
Licht Franz-Xaver Schaffer
 
Tänzerinnen Sachika Abe, Ann-Kathrin Adam, Marlúcia do Amaral, Doris Becker, Wun Sze Chan, Mariana Dias, Feline van Dijken, Christine Jaroszewski, Yuko Kato, So-Yeon Kim, Anne Marchand, Nicole Morel, Louisa Rachedi, Claudine Schoch, Virginia Segarra Vidal, Daniela Svoboda, Irene Vaqueiro
Tänzer Andriy Boyetskyy, Paul Calderone, Jackson Carroll, Martin Chaix, Helge Freiberg, Philip Handschin, Marquet K. Lee, Sonny Locsin, Marcos Menha, Chidozie Nzerem, Boris Randzio, Alexandre Simões, Remus Sucheana, Maksat Sydykov
Orchester Duisburger Philharmoniker