Short Summary
Hans van Manen’s video ballet Live is an icon of dance history:
an intimate exploration of mechanisms of perception for a ballerina, a danseur noble, a cameraman and a pianist. Martin Schläpfer, on the other hand, was inspired by Gustav Mahler’s 4th Symphony to create a great dance world theatre about the desires and forlornness, dreams, and distortions of the modern human being.
A woman is all alone on a large stage with her back towards us. A camera lies on the floor, pointing at her feet. A man enters, picks up the camera and uses it to pan the audience. Projected onto a giant screen, we become protagonists of a piece that uses the medium of film to initiate a masterful and mysterious game revolving around the mechanics of perception while exploding the boundaries of the stage space.
With his ballet Live, Hans van Manen created dance history. First performed in Amsterdam in 1979 and created in the pioneering age of video technology, Live has previously been danced exclusively by Dutch National Ballet, with whom Hans van Manen remains associated to this day as resident choreographer. At Martin Schläpfer’s special request, the Dutch artist has now entrusted his work to the Vienna State Ballet: the first time that he has allowed it to be performed by another company.
In his first work for Vienna, Ballet Director and Chief Choreographer Martin Schläpfer responded to this intimate chamber piece with a large-scale ballet dedicated to all the dancers in his ensemble. 4 is the simple title he gave to his world premiere danced to Gustav Mahler’s 4th Symphony, which, with its profound beauty, its precarious idylls, but also its wicked humour, sharp tones and drastic depiction of a paradise that is anything but heavenly, has inspired an entire world of dance theatre. Drawing on Mahler’s dramaturgy of disjunctions and distortions, Martin Schläpfer unfolds kaleidoscopic images of a mankind filled with desire, exposed and forlorn, rapt in dreams or confronted by life’s great questions – scenes “like the islands of a mighty archipelago” that are all connected together beneath the surface.
Impressions of the Choreographies
