Schläpfer's final

In a city where the musical tradition forms a decisive aesthetic coordinate system and the ensemble has two excellent orchestras at its side, the Vienna State Opera and the Volksoper Wien, the Vienna State Ballet has repeatedly opened up resonance spaces for choreographic reflections on music. This applies to Marco Goecke's world premiere Fly Paper Bird to the Adagietto from Gustav Mahler's 5th Symphony as well as to Martin Schläpfer's explorations of the composers Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Strauss, Gustav Mahler and Piotr I. Tchaikovsky in his own ten world premieres for the Vienna State Ballet. The Swiss was not only at the helm of the ensemble as a director, who regularly trained the company in addition to his curatorial and administrative duties, but also as a dance creator, as journalist Silvia Kargl wrote about him in the Wiener Kurier on the occasion of the Pathétique premiere in April:

However, the Vienna State Ballet became more permeable not only programmatically, but also structurally: With the Choreography Platform , young choreographers from the ensemble were given space within their own institution to create and present their pieces on the Volksoper stage, new formats such as the Tanzpodium discussion series, the DANCE MOVIES dance film series founded in collaboration with the Filmcasino, and a diverse outreach program, Matinees before premieres and, last but not least, a fundamental reorganization and reorientation of the Friends of the Vienna State Ballet opened up the house to the urban space, created networks with other cultural institutions as well as spaces for discussion and thought - dialogues about the role dance can and must play today in a time of global challenges and social uncertainties. Renewal and cultivation of tradition, technical excellence and expressiveness and an understanding of an ensemble as a lively, diverse community of people, also open to mature dancers, dedicated to the art of dance as one of the most exciting and vibrant arts of the present - all this has been demonstrated in five years of Martin Schläpfer's directorship and can now be experienced for the last time at the Vienna State Opera and Volksoper Vienna in June.

The current premiere Pathétique - a combination of George Balanchine's Divertimento No. 15, Merce Cunningham's Summerspace and Martin Schläpfer's latest work, which gives the opera its title - will be performed three more times. For two performances, Mahler returns live to the stage of the Vienna State Opera and once again presents Hans van Manen's iconic and rarely seen video ballet Live as well as Martin Schläpfer's great World Theater 4 to Gustav Mahler's 4th Symphony, in which the entire ensemble, including the Volksoper's corps de ballet, will reunite. This will be followed by a final dance festival with Sleeping Beauty.

New, unexpected, young: with a look into the future, Martin Schläpfer's premiere of Creations at the Volksoper also opens another window in his diverse planning with three choreographic world premieres and a new musical composition. Alessandra Corti deals with the theme of human identity in Aerea. Louis Stiens describes his creation High as a threatening celebration that does not want to end and, in its polarity of "high" and "low", the divine and the everyday, takes an ironic look at our contemporary life. The music for this piece was commissioned from one of the most interesting composers of our time: the Swede Lisa Streich. "Where do we come from, where are we, where are we going?" asks Martin Chaix in M to M, creating a ballet on pointe for a large cast of 46 dancers. This marks the end of a direction in which the Vienna State Ballet has transformed itself into an ensemble that not only masters classical music, but also questions it and understands dance as a universal language that never stands still.