Like boiling lava
Ballet |
A woman searches for a path. Carefully feeling her way, she takes one step in front of the other with a slight limp. Suddenly she collapses, but immediately stands up again and puts a hand to her head, lost in thought. She turns to the front, to the orchestra and its conductor, then to us in the audience - and as if she were letting go of her slowly opening arms, the music begins: the first bars of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 4 in G major.
It is a beginning like an initiation with which Martin Schläpfer opens his Ballet 4. It was created in the fall of 2020 as the first work by the Swiss choreographer, who had just taken over as director of the Vienna State Ballet. At the time, he wanted to bring the entire company to the stage - and more, to work with each individual personally. The large-scale ballet is now returning to the repertoire for two performances as part of the Mahler, Live program alongside Hans van Manen's video ballet Live to mark the finale of his five-year directorship. Patrick Lange conducts the Vienna State Opera Orchestra. Florina Ilie sings the soprano solo from "Heavenly Life".
Here you can read excerpts from an interview Anne do Paço conducted with Martin Schläpfer for the program booklet:
What qualities and impulses does Mahler's music open up for dance?
Mahler's music triggers strong images in me through its wealth of associations. It is unashamed and shy in so many places: whether it portrays nature, is onomatopoeic or childishly naive, goes into the transcendental or points into human collectives. Mahler never shied away from exposing himself - and he did so with such incredible pleasure and sensuality. He had a courage for euphoria and exaggeration that was always right on the edge of a knife, so that you never know whether you are about to be cut or whether you will get away with it again. At the same time, this music contains everything that drives people and what they long for: from sadness to hope, but without any superficial drama, without any pathos. For me, dealing with Mahler's music also means dealing with his biography. But I wasn't interested in making an artist's ballet about his life. I was interested in the moods he was in, the emotionality of his interpersonal relationships, including his Jewishness - and then he converted to Catholicism so that he could become court opera director, which was forbidden to Jews at the time. I was interested in the "temperature" that can be extracted from such a life and the question: what does all this have to do with us?
4 is a choreography that you have practically written into the body of your ensemble - you have dedicated your work to all 101 dancers.
It was important to me to start my work in Vienna with a world premiere, not to position myself on the safe side by rehearsing one of my well-known works, but not to shy away from the risk. Because only by entering into a dialog with each dancer from the very beginning can I get to know everyone. For the first time, the members of the Volksoper's corps de ballet can also be seen in a state opera premiere.
"For me, the dancer is the crown of the choreography, the creative artist who interprets my text at the moment of dancing and understands what his small movement means in the context of a larger context."
In a piece for such a large ensemble, you naturally have to let go of the idea that only a solo or a pas de deux is a fulfilling task. Rather, group sequences - if they are energetically arranged in the right way - also develop great power. For me, there are no small or large roles. The dancer in the background is seen and felt just as much as the one in the front row. The energy, personality and artistry of each individual is important - how much soul, concentration and dedication everyone gives. At the same time, it is also about the question of how modest you can be in unison so that an ensemble sounds like a great orchestra. Such unity has nothing to do with the loss of importance of an individual soloist, but is an act of humility: thinking along with your neighbor, sensing his timing and feelings. I think it's great to present yourself as an individual with your own personality, but at the same time to serve the idea of a piece and a collective - and to be able to watch it as an audience. It is the core of a democratic society, the core of a civilization based on tolerance ..
... a tolerance that does not make everyone equal, but respects everyone to the extent that they serve the idea of such togetherness ..
... in my view, the tool to give humanity a possible future.
So the group sequences with which you react to the music of the first movement of the 4th Symphony are much more than just a large, rather abstract dance prism?
Exactly. And there is another point: these scenes, which reflect my fascination with the great divertissements of romantic ballets, also show that my foundations are academic in nature. But for me, the muscular form of each individual dancer must burn, be extreme from within, not as an aesthetic idea, but as an act of self-giving. My dances should be like boiling lava. The vocabulary of the danse d'école thus remains for me not just a phrase from the past, but is filled with new life.