Dance touring
Ballett am Rhein Düsseldorf Duisburg
Ballett am Rhein Düsseldorf Duisburg
At the beginning of the 2009/2010 season, dancer and choreographer Martin Schläpfer became ballet director and chief choreographer at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf and Duisburg, where he re-formed the Ballett am Rhein with 48 dancers and the new building of an independent, ultra-modern ballet house. Dietrich Grosse-Mondigromax organised some international performances at this time.
The German-Argentinian Demis Volpi has been ballet director and chief choreographer at the Ballett am Rhein since the 2020/21 season. With him, 45 international dancers with a wide variety of artistic backgrounds create a dialogue-oriented team at eye level and a new, strong mediation approach to audience communication, the new profile of the company.
The Ballett am Rhein looks back on a long history of intensive dance work and strong artistic signatures. Finding a way to deal with this is both an opportunity and a challenge for a new management. It is important to Demis Volpi’s team to perceive these traditions, to build on them, to think ahead and to provide them with new impulses in order to give the Ballett am Rhein a new, strong direction of movement.
DREI MEISTER – DREI WERKE / TRES MAESTROS – TRES OBRAS
THREE MASTERS – THREE WORKS
GEORGE BALANCHINE / HANS VAN MANEN / WILLIAM FORSYTHE
RUBIES
Choreography: George Balanchine
Music: Igor Stravinsky, Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra (1929)
1. Presto, 2. Andante rapsodico, 3. Allegro capriccioso ma tempo giusto
Set Design: Pepe Leal
Costumes: Karinska
Rehearsal and Staging: Nanette Glushak
For 15 dancers
VISIONS FUGITIVES
Choreography: Hans van Manen
Music: Sergei Prokofiev
Visions Fugitives Op. 22 (1917), originally pieces for solo piano, arranged for string ensemble by Rudolf Barshai (1963)
Costumes and Set Design: Keso Dekker
Lighting: Joop Caboort
Rehearsal and Staging: Nancy Euverink
For 6 dancers
ENEMY IN THE FIGURE
Choreography: William Forsythe
Music: Thom Willems
Costumes, Set Design, and Lighting: William Forsythe
Stage and Lighting Supervision: Tanja Rühl
Rehearsal and Staging: Thomas McManus, Ana Catalina Román
For 11 dancers
BALLETT AM RHEIN DÜSSELDORF DUISBURG
Ballet Director: Raphaël Coumes-Marquet
Chief Choreographer: Bridget Breiner
Tour Management: Mondigromax – Cultivos de Cultura
February 28, 2025, 19:30 h
March 1, 2025, 19:00 h
Teatro Arriaga, Bilbao
Rubies, by George Balanchine, embodies the essence of this blood-red precious stone. The dancers energetically move across the stage to the rhythm of Stravinsky‘s Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra. Balanchine skilfully combines complex jumps and pointe work with jazz movements, reminiscent of those seen on Broadway stages. The kaleidoscopic scarlet images celebrate the energetic force of dance.
Visions Fugitives, created by Hans van Manen in 1990, is based on the eponymous music by Sergei Prokofiev. Full of harmony and dynamism, surprising and captivating, the movements and music merge into the ephemeral and attractive art of dance. A choreography that moves and inspires, makes no gender distinctions, and lets us forget the world around us for a moment.
The evening culminates with the work of William Forsythe, Enemy in the Figure, which oscillates between frenetic and calm, dark and mysterious, to the pulsating rhythm of the music. Light, an integral part of the choreography as much as the dance movements themselves, makes the space explode or shrink, causes the dancers to emerge from the darkness, and develops an irresistible attraction. At the centre of this exploration of light and darkness is the individual. This work, with its urgency and radical aesthetics, has not lost any of its modernity.
EIN DEUTSCHES REQUIEM
Music by Johannes Brahms
Choreography by Martin Schläpfer
Stage design by Florian Etti
Costumes by Cathrine Voeffray
Lighting by Volker Weinhart
October 12 to 14, 2018
Teatro Real, Madrid
March 9 & 10, 2017
Zuiderstrandtheater Den Haag, Holland
SEVEN 7th SYMPHONY GUSTAV MAHLER
Music: Symphony No. 7 in E minor by Gustav Mahler
Choreography by Martin Schläpfer
November 11 & 12, 2016
Teatro Arriaga, Bilbao, Spain
August 20 to 22, 2015
Playhouse Theatre, Edinburgh International Festival
It’s performances such as this that give the Edinburgh International Festival its reputation. Big, bold, a little off-kilter (but not too much) and bursting at the seams with talent. Dusseldorf’s Ballett am Rhein is a company like few others. Without a hierarchy in place, the dancers are all deemed equal, meaning there are no stars – just plenty of opportunities for them all to shine, a strategy that’s reflected in the quirky, yet accessible, vision of artistic director, Martin Schläpfer. THE SCOTSMAN
KUNST DER FUGE
Music Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080 by Johann Sebastian Bach
Choreography by Martin Schläpfer
Stage design by Thomas Zieger
Costumes by Catherine Voeffray
Lighing by Franz-Xaver Schaffer
In this ballet I play over and over again with the original meaning of “fuge”: escape or also persecution. That a voice flees from another voice seems to me a very choreographic idea; in other passages, on the contrary, it is more about personal circumstances. I play with the colors of the Baroque theory of affects, as well as with the biographical reflections of light from Bach’s life, with the halo of the composition as a sanctuary, but also with the daily life to which the composition was subjected at the time of the germination of “Kunst der Fuge”. By allowing barefoot dance, I am able to absorb the purity and energy of the music, while on the other hand, the high heels give my ballerinas some of the fragility of fallen angels.
Martin Schläpfer
