Dance Insights | Festival 2015

FESTIVAL 2015

DANCE INSIGHTS

A DIGNIFIED DANCE Dance Critic Kelly Apter talks to Martin Schläpfer about his epic choreographic response to Mahler’s enigmatic 7th Symphony

SEVEN Thu 20 – Sat 22 Aug 8pm Edinburgh Playhouse Tickets £10–£32 eif.co.uk/seven Supported by Geoff and Mary Ball

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Photo Gert Weigelt

he word ‘abstract’ can attract negative connotations in the dance world. Yet often, it’s the most powerful way to convey a message. For Swiss-born choreographer Martin Schläpfer, the creation of his powerful full-length work, Seven, wouldn’t have worked any other way.

A series of segments, some playful, others aggressive or poignant, Seven is an atmospheric work inspired by World War Two. But, as Schläpfer explains, with a subject matter that emotive, depicting it literally can lead to problems.

‘There are little stories throughout,’ he explains, ‘but in order not to become pretentious, you have to stay abstract. It’s a theme which, in theatre, we cannot go near the reality. That’s very important, out of dignity for what happened.’

As viewers, Schläpfer allows us to find our own narrative for each scene, be it a loving couple saying goodbye or a large ensemble moving in sharp unison.

Often, the mood is dictated by the score – Mahler’s multi-layered Symphony No 7. Sometimes, however, what the dancers wear on their feet also impacts on our reading of the piece, with footwear regularly changing from pointe shoes, to bare feet, to heavy boots.

‘I always think of what shoes to wear,’ says Schläpfer. ‘In Seven, it has to do with the different situations and colours in the music. For example, I find the third movement very dark, very odd, so of course you have to think of shoes.

‘I like the pointe shoe because it not only takes you up in a vertical manner, it’s also a very positive instrument for the women, it makes them strong.’

Although he had his own specific narrative in mind when creating the work, Schläpfer recognised that there is a universality to much of what he portrays. In particular, the highly theatrical climax, reminiscent of a children’s game of musical chairs where those not quick enough are left out. Something that will strike a chord in all of us.

‘I use a Jewish motif, especially in the first movement in terms of people being excluded,’ Schläpfer explains. ‘And in the scene I call ‘America’, where there is a theme of saying goodbye, and an abstract Nazi figure luring somebody away. Also at the end with the ‘Journey to Jerusalem’ – but these things don’t just go back to the Second World War, that’s something that’s here today and it’s probably an issue of every human being.’  Kelly Apter is Dance Critic for The Scotsman and The List

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FINAL CURTAIN CALL Sarah Crompton looks back over the extraordinary career of Sylvie Guillem as she presents her final dance programme

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he end of Sylvie Guillem’s dancing career is just as remarkable as the beginning. In December 1984, at the age of 19, she was plucked from the ranks by Rudolf Nureyev to become Paris Opera Ballet’s youngest ever Étoile. In December 2015, in Japan, she will dance for the last time, leaving the stage at her own volition at the age of 50. In between those two points, she shook the world, changing dance for ever. There has never been anyone like her.

She started out as a gymnast, before going to the Paris Opera Ballet School at the age of 11 on a year-long exchange. Then she fell in love with performing – ‘Curtain up, that was it!’ – and stayed, always a prodigious talent. She has always acknowledged how lucky she was to possess an unusual combination of strength and suppleness, with beautiful, sharp feet, and the famous ability easily to raise her leg upright past her ear. But what makes Guillem unique is what she chose to do with those natural gifts. She has worked liked a demon, propelled by a vision of what dance could be, an idea of perfection, physical, dramatic and intellectual. ‘Dance should touch people,’ she says.

In pursuit of that belief, she quit Paris Opera Ballet when it started to stifle her desire for freedom

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to explore, and the Royal Ballet, where she spent 12 years as a principal guest artist, when it did the same. Her move towards contemporary dance in the last decade has produced a dazzling coda to a career both original and unforgettable.

In this way, Guillem’s final programme is typical.

Once she had decided to retire ‘while I am still happy doing what I do with pride and passion’ she also decided ‘I wanted to carry on exploring.’ So Life in Progress contains two new works, technê by Akram Khan, Here & After by Russell Maliphant alongside DUO2015 by William Forsythe and the solo Bye, by Mats Ek, which she premiered in 2011.

The title of the evening is also characteristic.

Guillem does not see this as an end but a beginning.

She is passionate about environmental causes, including the marine conservation organisation Sea Shepherd and the seed foundation Association Kokopelli, and she may work more on their behalf.

She may sit in her garden and look at the sky. But she is convinced that what is to come will be as satisfying as what she is leaving behind. The only problem is that her legion of loyal fans will not be able to watch it.  Sarah Crompton is a freelance critic and writer

SYLVIE GUILLEM – LIFE IN PROGRESS Sat 8 – Mon 10 Aug 7.30pm Festival Theatre Tickets £14–£50 eif.co.uk/guillem A Sadler’s Wells production, co-produced with Les Nuits de Fourvière, China Shanghai International Arts Festival and Sylvie Guillem

Photo Carl Fox

Sponsored by

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BALLETT ZÜRICH Thu 27 – Sat 29 Aug 7.30pm Edinburgh Playhouse Tickets £10–£32 eif.co.uk/zurich

With additional support from Swiss Cultural Fund UK

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Photo Judith Schlosser

Supported by

POETRY IN MOTION Kelly Apter talks to Christian Spuck and Wayne McGregor about collaborating and using both Max Richter’s striking contemporary version of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and Shakespeare’s sonnets as inspiration

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utual admiration is an important part of any working relationship, but talking to the creative team at Ballett Zürich, it’s clear they have more than most.

Appointed artistic director of the Swiss company in 2012, Christian Spuck was barely in the door before inviting friend and choreographer Wayne McGregor to create a new piece. McGregor, says Spuck, is ‘a fabulous choreographer and a very nice person’, and having a work by him in the Ballett Zürich repertoire ‘is a big honour’.

Happily, McGregor’s opinion of Spuck is equally favourable. ‘I knew Christian when he was at Stuttgart Ballet, so I had a personal connection with him,’ he says. ‘And when I heard him talk about his passion and vision for Ballett Zürich, I wanted to be a part of it.’

McGregor arrived at the company with a handful of ideas, but no actual steps, ready to enlist the dancers in the creative process.

‘I like dancers to be open and curious,’ he says. ‘And for them to be active participants in the creation, and help solve problems with me. Christian has created an amazing energy in the company, so I had a really lovely time in Zurich.’

The end result is Kairos, an exciting blend of classical ballet with a contemporary

aesthetic. The score, Max Richter’s striking Recomposed: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons, is the result of another close friendship.

‘Max and I have a great collaborative relationship’, explains McGregor. ‘He sent me Recomposed before it was published, and I knew it would make an amazing dance – but I had to find the right context for it. And he very kindly waited until I did.’

Other dance companies had asked Richter if they could use the score, but were all told that McGregor had first dibs.

Something Spuck was equally happy about, calling Richter’s re-working of Vivaldi, ‘absolute genius’.

Meanwhile, Spuck’s own half of the Ballett Zürich double bill, Sonett was born out of his long-held love for Shakespeare’s sonnets, which are read out during the piece.

‘Shakespeare’s language is incredibly beautiful, so I wanted his sonnets not just to be the inspiration for the ballet – but to actually be part of it,’ says Spuck. ‘The piece isn’t about the sonnets themselves though, it’s more about how mysterious they are. Everything is unclear, and that’s what I find fascinating. They’re also the most beautiful love poetry I’ve ever read in my life.’  Kelly Apter

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CONTEMPORARY FLAMENCO The Guardian’s Dance Critic Judith Mackrell profiles Israel Galván, the man who reinvented flamenco

LO REAL / LE RÉEL / THE REAL

Photo Javier del Real

Wed 19 – Fri 21 Aug 7.30pm Festival Theatre Tickets £12–£30 eif.co.uk/loreal

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ome of flamenco’s greatest performers have been born into dancing dynasties, the traditions of their artform bred deep into their bones. Israel Galván is no exception. Having been born in Seville, the epicentre of the flamenco world, he learned his craft from his parents, Jose Galván and Eugenia de los Reyes, both of them professional dancers.

Galván has said that dancing always came easily to him, so easily that for many years he felt ‘it was a game.’ Even now at the age of 41 there’s something eerily effortless in the way his angular body throws off the more virtuoso flamenco moves – the fast percussive footwork, the tight, whipping turns. Yet while Galván’s artistry is based on a solid core of classical flamenco training, his own choreography has moved into far more experimental terrain. With almost every piece he’s created since forming his own company in 1998 he’s been pushing the limits of his art form. In his 2009 adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, he manipulated the language of flamenco to dark expressionist effect. In Solo he performed in silence, using the sounds of his body – the rapid fire drumming of his feet, the clicking of his fingers, the rhythm of his breath – as his only musical accompaniment. In Torobaka he collaborated with the Kathak trained choreographer Akram Khan to create a fascinating dialogue between their different styles. And in Lo Real he’s taken on the

challenge of narrating an extremely painful period in the history of flamenco, the persecution of gypsies during the fascist regimes of Franco and Hitler.

Using music that ranges from popular forms like granaina and malaguena, to a fandango-inflected arrangement of Antony and The Johnsons’ Hitler in My Heart, Galván takes his choreography to anguished extremes as he attempts to show the suffering of the half million gypsies who were imprisoned, tortured and killed during that period. Among the specific evils to which his narrative alludes is that of Nazi film maker Leni Riefenstahl who casually drafted Central European gypsies into the cast of her 1943 film Tiefland before allowing them to be returned to the concentration camps where they would meet their certain deaths.

Over the years the more purist elements in the flamenco community have criticized Galván for abandoning, or distorting the traditions with which he grew up. But Galván thinks it would be unnatural for him to remain rooted in the past. As he’s said ‘I went to college. I use the internet and I go to movies’ And the experimental boldness of his work clearly has the blessing of his father Jose, since in 2009 he gave one of his most acclaimed performances dancing in the cast of Metamorphosis.  Judith Mackrell is Dance Critic for The Guardian

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WHAT’S IN A NAME

Photo Fan Xi

Mary Brennan previews Tao Ye, the choreographer who has taken China’s dance world by storm

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ew of us would regard a four hour commute as an inspiring way to bookend a working day. For Chinese choreographer Tao Ye, however, the long haul to his rehearsal space morphed into a creative process. To-ing and fro-ing along the same route took on compelling re-iterative rhythms, until the very act of covering the same ground – albeit from different directions – began to feel like a meditation in motion.

From these beginnings, Tao Ye made the triptych Weight x 3, one of the pieces his company will perform in this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. The other work, 5, sees a quintet of dancers become as one in a cluster of constantly re-aligning shapes. It is, in essence, a kinetic sculpture that could well be called ‘Touch’ – except Tao Ye avoids word titles and uses numbers instead.

Simplicity meets stringency, tinged with a desire for truth...

It could be a mantra for Tao Dance Theatre – only the truth is that’s an inexact translation of the original Chinese. According to Tao Ye, the name is really ‘Body Theatre’ – and indeed, everything he does starts with the body. As a child, his own was so remarkably flexible that dance training seemed the obvious course – but the obvious (be it Chinese traditional or Western ballet) didn’t speak to Tao Ye’s inner, spiritual being. For him, dance was a nonverbal way of expressing himself, not a step-by-step imitation of someone else’s construction.

So in 2008, when he was just 22, Tao Ye founded his own company and began looking for other dancers who could take his

rigorously demanding movement into their own bodies. Supple dancers, tireless dancers, who could channel the serene energy of his choreography through slow-arching curves of the spine or into seemingly boneless arms and legs. Hold moments where hips face forward while the upper body twists sideways, and a spiralling calligraphy of unhurried limbs hints at inner states across time and space. It is this grace – allied to stamina and pure precision – that sees Tao Ye’s profound, if minimalist, choreography described as ‘mesmerising’ or ‘hypnotic’. For some, it hovers between a poem and a prayer...

Tao Ye himself doesn’t care to trap his work, or himself, in definitions. He also shies away from categorising himself as an Eastern, or a Chinese choreographer. He is, rather, a visionary traveller in the realms of movement – he and his company stop briefly here, in August.  Mary Brennan is the Dance/ Performance Critic for The Herald

TAO DANCE THEATRE Mon 17 & Tue 18 Aug 8pm Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh Tickets £10–£32 eif.co.uk/tao Supported by The Ministry of Culture, People’s Republic of China Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United Kingdom The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo

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Photo Clark James

FIERY FESTIVAL FINALE!

VIRGIN MONEY FIREWORKS CONCERT

Festival 2015 concludes with a spectacular concert, with fireworks launched from Edinburgh’s iconic Castle to music inspired by dance from Strauss, Brahms and Dvořák, performed live by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

Monday 31 August 9.30pm eif.co.uk/virginmoneyfireworks Sponsored by

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