INTO THE MUSIC is a triple bill of modern ballets by Jiri Kylian, Morgann Runacre-Temple and Uwe Scholz, danced by a fine ensemble.
FORGOTTEN LAND. Jiri Kylian takes his inspiration from Benjamin Britten’s dark and powerful Sinfonia da Requiem and Edvard Munch’s painting The Dance of Life, a lament for lost lives. ‘Every work I have made,’ says Kylian, ‘is about love (love for dance) and death.’
The opening, with the dancers with their backs to the audience slowly walking upstage, advancing and retreating, in unison towards a stormy horizon has an immediate impact which it never loses. There is no story. The unrelenting energy and speed of the music and the dynamic choreography is exciting.
HOTEL. We live in a world of CCTV surveillance. Choreographed by Morgann Runacre-Temple to sound (rhythm, rhythm, rhythm) by Mikael Karlsson, is an integration of dancers and live and pre-recorded film, recording the actions of staff and guests in rooms and a corridor with numerous doors.
Voyeuristic, sinister, weird and increasingly surreal, the intention of the piece is to make dance more appealing to those who find dance difficult and unappealing.
SEVENTH SYMPHONY, Beethoven’s most cheerful work has been described by Richard Wagner as ‘the apotheosis of the dance’. The late German choreographer Uwe Scholz, who died young in 2004, said that he was offering something of Cranko plus a little bit of Balanchine and that the ballet made a definite dramatic statement, though he left audiences to decide what that statement was.
There is no action other than dance. Neo-classical, inventive, fresh, repetitive, joyful, energetic and quick, slow and lyrical, it’s a happy-happy occasion with big-big smiles, false climaxes and everybody in a circle holding hands.
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