Martin Schläpfer is giving with Antoine Jully a dancer in his company the opportunity to present himself also as a choreographer in Ballett am Rhein’s programme. It is a concern of his as ballet director to encourage and support such talents and to place at their disposal the professional performing framework of a major opera-house. Antoine Jully, trained at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris, created his first choreographies as early as 1999 for a workshop of London’s Royal Ballet; further pieces followed for Ballet d’Europe in Marseille, where he was engaged as a dancer from 2002 to 2005. The world première of „Inside“ now follows as his first choreography for Ballett am Rhein.

His new creation plays with the idea of thinking of dancers in a piece as being the colours in a painting, and then invading pictures choreographically and overstepping the limits of artistic genre. To music by Pēteris Vasks and Jan Novák Antoine Jully conceives a playfully cheerful piece which has elements of surprise in store, and integrates and plays off against each other the various disciplines of music, painting, circus artistry, video and dance.


 
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Inside
World première
Antoine Jully

Music
Cantabile from the concert for violine und string orchestra („Distant Light“) by Pēteris Vasks and capriccio for violoncello und orchestra by Jan Novák
 

Choreographie, Bühne, Kostüme und Video Antoine Jully
Musikalische Leitung Dante Anzolini
Licht Volker Weinhart
 
Tänzerinnen Sachika Abe, Ann-Kathrin Adam, Camille Andriot, Doris Becker, Mariana Dias, Feline van Dijken, Cristina Garcia Fonseca, Yuko Kato, So-Yeon Kim, Nicole Morel, Louisa Rachedi
Tänzer Paul Calderone, Martin Chaix, Florent Cheymol, Marquet K. Lee, Sonny Locsin, Bruno Narnhammer, Bogdan Nicula, Christian Bloßfeld, Alexandre Simões, Remus Sucheana, Pontus Sundset, Maksat Sydykov
Violoncello Doo-Min Kim
Orchester Düsseldorfer Symphoniker
 

Somebody tells of an old man with whom he goes fishing on mornings. Between the two there is little talk, but the everyday question of whether the fish are biting or not creates a sort of silent rapport, an unspoken confidentiality. Almost laconically without a trace of pathos the American blues singer J. J. Cale conjured up this lifelong friendship in 1974 with his sparingly instrumented song “The old man and me”, in turn in 1996 inspiring the choreographer Hans van Manen to one of his masterpieces. He created for the two dance personalities Sabine Kupferberg and Gérard Lemaître a pas de deux about a love between two people as tender as it is unconditional, which outlasts time beyond any physical aspect. For this he combined J. J. Cale’s song with Stravinsky’s “Circus Polka” and the famous second movement from Mozart’s piano concerto in A major. “One day,” Hans van Manen reveals, I was lying in my bath when I heard the Adagio from Mozart’s 23rd concerto on the radio. I jumped out of the water immediately: I knew, that’s it!” To this music the lights on stage continually go on and off, on again and off again, as if one were regarding the two dancers “as photos from their own past”.

Hans van Manen has numbered for many years among the most important figures along the path of Martin Schläpfer’s career, as advisor, critic – and friend. Out of his deep affinity with the Dutch choreographer he himself will make a comeback as a dancer and take over the male lead in this memorable pas de deux about a couple and love growing older.

 
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THE OLD MAN AND ME
Hans van Manen

Music
"The Old Man and Me" by J. J. Cale, “Circus Polka” by Igor Stravinsky, Adagio (2nd movement) from the 23rd piano concerto in A major (KV 488) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
 

Choreographie Hans van Manen
Musikalische Leitung Dante Anzolini
Bühne und Kostüme Keso Dekker
Licht Joop Caboort
Einstudierung Mea Venema
 
Klavier Cécile Tallec
Tänzerin Marlúcia do Amaral
Tänzer Martin Schläpfer
Orchester Düsseldorfer Symphoniker
 

Very, very quietly, pppp, a single tone reaches our ears as if from a great distance, that is, “lontano”, to spread itself gradually more and more over the orchestral instruments and to become an entire piece of music. Its rhythms are fluid and without any clearly recognizable impulses, the chords are shining, the forms organic – the subtlest of tonal areas and clusters, against which and with which on stage two female and four male dancers in solos, pas de deux, pas de trois and tuttis hold their ground in a language of motion which has already long stood for the unmistakable and fascinating style of Martin Schläpfer: development of academic dance technique into ballet art for our time.
After only twelve minutes it is all over – and watchers and listeners in a curious state of mystery and expectation. “Lontano” for large orchestra, composed in 1967, numbers among the key works of the composer György Ligeti – to it in 2009 Martin Schläpfer created, as his first world première for Het Nationale Ballet im Amsterdam, one of his most signal choreographies.

And yet more than “merely” a taking of the measure of the energy set free by Ligeti’s composition, the ballet “Lontano” is also a positioning with regard to George Balanchine. in his recent work Martin Schläpfer has repeatedly looked back to the dance art of the noted neoclassic master, in order to make the search of its roots, their exploration and also the friction fruitful for a language of motion all his own. The contrast with “Agon” was expressly intentional. And as such now – after a change of programme thwarted first plans in Amsterdam – Ballett am Rhein will now be first to present a revision juxtaposed to that masterpiece from the year 1957 which is held to be the most radical testimony of Balanchine’s art of dance.

 
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LONTANO
Martin Schläpfer

Music
“Lontano” for Orchestra by György Ligeti
 

Choreographie Martin Schläpfer
Musikalische Leitung Dante Anzolini
Bühne und Kostüme Keso Dekker
Licht Bert Dalhuysen
 
Tänzerinnen Ann-Kathrin Adam, Wun Sze Chan
Tänzer Philip Handschin, Bruno Narnhammer, Boris Randzio, Pontus Sundset
Orchester Düsseldorfer Symphoniker
 

With a certain lack of modesty which was part of him, George Balanchine described himself once as the representative on earth of Terpsichore, the muse of dance. One may at first be inclined to smile at this, but he was not so far wrong in his estimation. With his extensive œuvre Balanchine is not only perhaps the most significant choreographer of the 20th century, but serves also with his dance art as one of the most impressive models to this day for those who came after him. There is no way to elude Balanchine; and this is true especially for one of his works which numbers among his greatest ballets, and more than that: in its variety of form, its expressiveness, the newness of its rhythms and sounds, its recognition of music as an equal partner to which one does not succumb, but with which one carries out a dialogue, and finally with its amazing unification of elements of classical ballet in highest perfection to techniques of modern dance, “Agon” after the composition of the same title by Stravinsky is one of the most significant witnesses to the New York avant-garde in the 1950s.

Balanchine himself confessed with regard to this ballet: “‘Agon’ is for me the essence of contemporary ballet. Stravinsky composed it specially for us. (…) In my view it is his and our most perfect ballet, evidencing total alliance between composer and choreographer”. His impresario Lincoln Kirstein added, “No other work of dance is so intensely organized or its less than twenty minutes of movement so closely woven. But the duration in time is out of proportion to its visual content. ‘Agon’ contains a sum of concentrated motion exceeding that of most full-length ballets of the century before it”.


 
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AGON
George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust

Music
"Agon" by Igor Stravinsky
 

Choreographie George Balanchine
Musikalische Leitung Dante Anzolini
Licht Volker Weinhart
Einstudierung Patricia Neary
 
Tänzerinnen und Tänzer Claudine Schoch, Marcos Menha, Louisa Rachedi, Alexandre Simões, Doris Becker, So-Yeon Kim, Paul Calderone, Jackson Carroll, Aisha L. Arechaga, Virginia Segarra Vidal, Anna Tsybina, Irene Vaqueiro
Orchester Düsseldorfer Symphoniker