Mozart ballet and gentle summer day

"Dear Lincoln, just a word to say how much I respect you. So many years. It's a long and rich history. As always, my admiration for Mr. Balanchine and you. Forever, Merce," wrote the choreographer
on George Balanchine's death in 1983 to the great impresario Lincoln Kirstein, with whom Balanchine had laid the foundations of the American ballet tradition by founding the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet. the world premiere of Cunningham's Summerspace took place 25 years earlier.

A work that is not only indicative of Cunningham's unique collaborative approach, but also brought together great artists: Morton Feldman composed the music, Robert Rauschenberg created the set and costume design. The piece was developed during the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's summer residency at Connecticut College and was originally intended to be a "meditation on space" due to the large hall in which the ensemble rehearsed - from which the title Summerspace is derived.

At the time Summerspace was created, Merce Cunningham's "law" that dance, music and decoration are created independently and separately and are only brought together at the end of the rehearsal process, in the dress rehearsal or sometimes even in the premiere, had long been established. For Summerspace , the choreographer conveyed his ideas about space and rhythmic structures, which reminded him of summer, of Rauschenberg, who would create a pointillist landscape within the set and costume design in a completely different location than the one where rehearsals took place.

Morton Feldman, who in turn was in a different place from Cunningham and Rauschenberg, composed Ixion solely inspired by a telephone conversation with Rauschenberg: "It was the most incredible collaboration I've ever been involved in in my life. I didn't see the dance. I just asked Merce to tell me the time structure, which I then regulated in various ways and changed the structures, as if working with a wax cloth. [...] The image of the dance came from a conversation I had with Rauschenberg on the phone, not from the dance itself. Bob told me that the set was pointillist and that he would use the same colors for the costumes. That also gave me an idea: instead of running three scenes - Merce, Bob and myself - I decided to merge with the decor. So the score is pointillist." The combination of movement, music and design in Summerspace brings the title to full fruition: the work resembles a balmy, gentle summer's day in which the dancers move across the stage like bird creatures, following invisible coordinates.

Summerspace is still one of the most celebrated works in Cunningham's oeuvre and is one of his classics. in 1966, it was included in the repertoire of Balanchine's New York City Ballet - an innovation: the dancers wore pointe shoes in this version, which for many made the image of the dancing flock of birds even stronger. After Balanchine and Cunningham had only crossed paths very briefly in the days of Ballet Society (the "predecessor" of New York City Ballet), for which Cunningham created The Seasons on behalf of Kirstein, the rehearsal of Summerspace for Balanchine's ensemble was a moment in which the different worlds of the two dance visionaries came together.

"Dance is music made visible" - probably Balanchine's most famous saying also comes to the fore in his Mozart ballet Divertimento No. 15 . In contrast to Cunningham's approach of allowing music and dance to be free from each other and thus creating new spaces for experience and perception, Balanchine's credo was to make the music visible with the dancers' bodies, to give it a body, to translate it into movement. Mozart's Divertimento No. 15, a composition written in 1777 to mark the name day of Countess Maria Antonia Lodron, was described by Balanchine as the "greatest divertimento ever written".

It is one of the few pieces of music from Mozart's oeuvre that Balanchine created - but twice. The choreographer Caracole, whose premiere cast included Jerome Robbins, created the Divertimento as early as 1952. When Balanchine was asked four years later, in 1956, to create a work for the Mozart Festival of the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut, he initially wanted to revive Caracole, but then decided to choreograph a new ballet during the rehearsal process.

Balanchine, as a bridge builder between the ballet art of the 19th and 20th centuries, took the vocabulary of the danse de'école further, made the dancer's body aware of its own athleticism and made it possible to visually experience making music with the body in space. Cunningham, on the other hand, is one of the main representatives of modern dance, has radically changed conventional thinking about dance and the origin of dance and, by developing his own technique, has given dancers the opportunity to understand his choreographies not only from the outside, but also from the inside.

Both artists are among the most important choreographers in dance history. They have not only left their mark on dance in New York and America, but their works are still groundbreaking and breathtaking as well as inspiring visual experiences for audiences all over the world.