Abstract
This ballet evening will feature three masterpieces of contemporary dance, with works by William Forsythe, Jiří Kylián and Ohad Naharin. All three pieces have written ballet history.
William Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated is considered his most successful choreography, as it combines all the elements of his choreographic aesthetic for the first time. Created for the ballet of the Paris Opera, the piece is built upon the tremendous dynamic between deceleration and acceleration. Tense, compact bodies brace themselves against one another, wrestling for balance and unleashing explosive energy in the process. Against the backdrop of Thom Willems’ electronic music, physical energy is distributed centrifugally in space, while the classically harmonious lines are expanded into new dimensions and the familiar suddenly seems alien and novel.
Jiří Kylián choreographed Gods and Dogs for theNederlands Dans Theater, on which he exerted a decisive influence as its director of many years. In his hundredth creation for the renowned ballet company – a lugubriously mysterious chamber ballet for four couples – Kylián reflects on the boundaries between normality and madness, and calls the norms of such attributions into question. Kylián’s sensually poetic dance language and infallible sense of musicality make this ballet – whose vivid title refers to a mysterious dual figure from the realm of the Pharaohs – a fascinating piece.
With Minus 16, Ohad Naharin – director of Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company for more than 25 years – has succeeded in creating a piece that is a spirited, swinging celebration of the desire to dance and joie de vivre in which the ballet ensemble presents itself with humour, wildly exuberant joy in movement and acrobatic audacity to the strains of a surprising mixture of music.
