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A Suite of Dances

on October 12, 2021
This is the page for the performance on October 12, 2021.
Choreography Jerome Robbins, George Balanchine

Cast 12.10.2021

Glass Pieces

Conductor Benjamin Pope
Komponist Philip Glass
Choreography Jerome Robbins
Stage Design Jerome Robbins Ronald Bates
Costume Design Ben Benson
Lighting Design Ronald Bates
Staging Jean-Pierre Frohlich

Duo Concertant

Komponist Igor Strawinski
Choreography George Balanchine
Lighting Design Ronald Bates
Staging Ben Huys
Violine Fedor Rudin
Piano Shino Takizawa
Tänzerin Liudmila Konovalova
Tänzer Masayu Kimoto

A Suite of Dances

Komponist Johann Sebastian Bach
Choreography Jerome Robbins
Costume Santo Loquasto
Lighting Design Jennifer Tipton
Staging Jean-Pierre Frohlich
Violoncello Ditta Rohmann
Tänzer Davide Dato

The Concert

Choreography Jerome Robbins
Komponist Frédéric Chopin in einer Orchestrierung von Clare Grundman
Stage Design Saul Steinberg
Costume Design Holly Hynes by Irene Sharaff
Lighting Design Jennifer Tipton
Staging Ben Huys
Piano Igor Zapravdin
Die Ballerina Elena Bottaro
Der Ehemann Francesco Costa
Die Ehefrau Ketevan Papava
Ein schüchterner Jüngling Arne Vandervelde
Eine energische Frau Fiona McGee

Details

An American neoclassical dance festival with works by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins – a new combination of works from the Wiener Staatsballett repertoire with the addition of the first Staatsballett performance of »A Suite of Dances«.

For George Balanchine, rooted in the ballet world of St. Petersburg under tsarist rule, the past was a springboard into the future. In Paris in the 1920s, he joined the Ballets Russes – and therefore became part of the avant-garde movement. From 1934 onwards, he made New York the new home of ballet. With a life’s work comprising 425 works, Balanchine reworked classic-academic dance for the 20th century, shaping his New York City Ballet into one of the most important of modern dance companies. When Balanchine appointed Jerome Robbins to the position of Associate Artistic Director in 1949, this also marked the start of a connection between Balanchine’s ensemble and Robbins that was to last over 40 years. With his ballets and his works for Broadway, Robbins found a way of combining high art and commercial entertainment in a fascinating way. We associate musicals like »West Side Story«, »Fiddler on the Roof« and »The King and I« with Robbins just as much as his subtle choreographic studies of humanity in the modern age.

Robbins was one of the first choreographers to be inspired by the music of the American minimalist composer Philip Glass, a composer whose music is now extremely popular and frequently used for ballet scores. In his »Glass Pieces« (1983), using extracts from »Glassworks« and the opera »Akhnaten«, Robbins created a ballet which is driven by the energies of urban life. As if operating at high voltage, 42 dancers develop an architecture from their bodies and movements, through a combination of athleticism and elegance, classical ballet, modern dance and everyday movement. Using the repetitive structures of the music, which find their visual counterpart in a backdrop consisting of a framework that looks like graph paper, Robbins uses the basic elements of human movements, such as simple everyday walking, stylised steps, and running, to create a motion study on de-individualisation and the driven-ness of human beings. Only for one moment does the world stand still in the midst of this breathless activity, with a pas de deux created for the two NYCB principals Maria Calegari and Bart Cook, in which Robbins, with a tremendous intimacy which manages to avoid all sentimentality, moves the focus away from the mass of humanity towards the individual – a man and a woman, a couple, coming face to face with each other.

The centre of the programme is made up of two chamber-type miniatures of American neoclassicism: in Balanchine’s »Duo Concertant« (1972), set to music of the same name for violin and piano by Igor Stravinsky, a male dancer and a female dancer are first seen standing behind a concert grand piano, just listening to the music. Soon, however, they become involved in the musical performance and lose themselves, with a wealth of highly sophisticated choreographic ideas, in a duet which develops into a moving chamber piece about love and longing.

Robbins’ »Suite of Dances«, created in 1994 for Mikhail Baryshnikov, is an intimate »talking«. Based on several movements from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Suites for Solo Cello, an finely nuanced dialogue, sometimes spirited and witty and sometimes reflective, is created between a dancer and a female cellist.

»The Concert« (1956) is one of the funniest ballets ever created. Robbins has a pianist playing Chopin with an almost holy seriousness while the ballet ensemble responds to the music, sometimes with sophisticated flights of fancy and sometimes in a crazy sequence of mishaps and slapstick-style numbers. Ballerinas in tutus are carried across the stage like lifeless shop-window dummies, becoming chaotically entangled with each other and trying in vain to bring their steps into harmony in the famous »Mistake Waltz«. A frustrated husband, full of murderous thoughts, creeps around his bored wife and ends up in an embarrassing series of male fantasies after a »Mad Ballerina« has given him »Butterflies in the Stomach«. All this flighty pleasure is ultimately too much even for the pianist: armed with a butterfly net, he tries to recapture all the fantastical creatures he has conjured up with Chopin’s music.

The works by Jerome Robbins are performed with the permission of © The Robbins Rights Trust, of George Balanchine’s »Duo Concertant« with the permission of © The George Balanchine Trust.