How does Staatsoper handle this middle of the road Romeo from 1962? With relative aplomb. The orchestra did seem a little undermanned or thin for Prokofiev's magnificent score in comparison to performances I've heard in Moscow and St Petersburg.

On the dance front after two years of Harangozo's whip hand, the corps de ballet handles their part without a false step. Standardising on the Russian norm has left a very svelte and elegant corps.

Rafaella Sant'Anna, Ketevan Papava and Liudmila Trayan are all fun as the Montague good time girls. Thomas Mayerhofer and Alexandra Kontrus were fine as the Capulet parents but not extraordinarily stately. Still when Alexandra Kontrus is carried away with her son Tybald one's heart breaks for the bereaved mother.

That's the pity of Romeo and Juliet, it always ends in tears, no mattter how playful Mercutio or how sweet Romeo. Juliet's brother Tybald must kill Mercutio and then Romeo must murder his brother in law. That events go downhill from there is no surprise. Manslaughter and murder rarely ends well.

Denys Cherevchenko as Mercutio relishes his moments in the spotlight and has the legs to take advantage of free flowing part. On the other side, Kyrill Kourlaev as Tybalt is intent on protecting his sister and totally humourless. Kourlaev is anything but grim in real life, so he's up to his usual fine acting. Mortally injured Kourlaev throws himself down on the stage and rolls across in his death throes. I saw at least three solid bruises in just a single evening and he had two performances in three days. Method to the end.  Dramatic ballet at its best.

Roman Lazik is less convincing as Romeo. Lazik is the typical leading dancer with long, long legs and an open face. Unfortunately he doesn't seem to be doing much with his natural gifts and relies on facile charm throughout the evening. He never seems especially ardent. One has difficulty imagining why Juliet would cross her entire family for the sake of such a diffident fellow.

Alexandra Tcacenco as Paris doesn't come off any better on the other side. He doesn't seem to be really taken with Juliet nor nearly jealous enough. The only one really looking out for Juliet is her brother.

Despite Lazik's weak pitch for her heart, Irina Tsymbal does manage to capture the impetuousness passion of first love. She glides across the stage and melts our tired hearts with the sweet flutter of her arms and her toes.

I would be intrigued to see something more experimental done with the male roles here. Kourlaev doesn't have the sweet looks of a typical leading man, but rather the menacing features of a Rothbart or Crassius. But there is no reason not to cast him against external type and see how he does. Based on how he's handled everything offered to him to date, it would likely be very well.

If they could find a petite enough Juliet, even Cherevychko might be a fun Romeo. But first he'd have to promise to act and not try to dazzle us with circus jumps. In any case, Lazik is on the cusp of being a little bit too old to convincingly portray Romeo and Staatsoper Ballet will have to work on finding alternative leading men.

Overall the Wiener Staatsoper Romeo and Julie is well worth a glance if you'd like to see a good if not scintillating version of Cranko's classic. If you hit the right cast, the evening may well be splendid.

Tanz Company Gervasi Geckos Kenia Bernai Gonzales Leoni Wahl

And so it is with Geckos.

Here we meet in the rehearsal hall on Laxenburgerstrasse. The ceilings are a bit lower than in a full theatre, the seating more limited. But no matter, Markus Schwarz's light makes the space bigger, pouring light through blinds set up between a side room and the main rehearsal space.

Leoni Wahl Salvatore la Ferla

The décor is a single red armchair which serves as a place for lovers to sit together, for one lover to miss the absent one and for another as a cliff from which she considers self-destruction.

Tanz Company Gervasi Geckos Leoni Wahl psychological tightrope

Gervasi is working with three dancers here, all excellent. The long and handsome Italian Salvatore la Ferla, the compact Kenia Bernai Gonzales and longtime muse Leoni Wahl.

All three begin pinned up against a wall in a very peculiar way.

Kenia Bernai Gonzales Leoni Wahl Salvatore la Ferla against the wall

The threesome binds and parts into two couples in a complicated relationship which never fully clarifies itself. What is apparent is that gradually Leoni Wahl's character drifts into solitude.

Tanz Company Gervasi Geckos Kenia Bernai Gonzales Leoni Wahl 2

Throughout these divagation of the relationship, the dancers express their feelings for one another or their feelings alone through steps and movement.

Tanz Company Gervasi Geckos Leoni Wahl

Each dancer is on a trajectory of his or her own which leads to a somewhat symphonic emotional impression.

Tanz Company Gervasi Geckos Kenia Bernai Gonzales in motion

Geckos lasts an hour but it feels like half an hour, as one just sits back and lets the steps and the emotion of the dancers take over. The sophisticated atmospheric track from Albert Castello helps. While the atmospheric soundspace is neither melodic enough nor innovative enough to make the listener want to take it home, within the space and context it is excellent.

Kenia Bernai Gonzales Leoni Wahl Salvatore la Ferla

Despite these strong points, Geckos has several weak points. One feels that Gervasi could intervene more forcefully with his dancers. For instance, Leoni Wahl's steps, while absorbing, are another variation on what Gervasi regulars have seen for many years.

Leoni Wahl Geckos Elio Gervasi

As brilliant and energetic a dancer as Wahl is one feels that her movment is becoming too self-referential.

One sometimes wishes that rather than developing the dancers own expression again, Gervasi would impose his own order on them. In line with a desire for greater specificity, I felt that the libretto could be more developed: more precise emotional moments in a story more deliberately told. But a clearer storyline is not as important as a clear choreographic vision.

For the moment, it would do no harm if for a few pieces, Gervasi and Wahl's shared exploration of movement yielded to a clear and trenchant choreographic language.

All photos by Alec Kinnear © Elio Gervasi, the artists and Alec Kinnear. More Gervasi Geckos photos here.

I was certain that the very sexy poster - all over Bratislava - was for a visiting performance, an updated Lord of the Dance. But I was very wrong. Everest is home grown.

After two years in Bratislava, Slovak National Ballet Director Mário Radačovský has staged his second full length evening work. His first Warhol was a strangely mainstream look at an artist who was a determinedly avant garde. I'm not sure if others ever made more sense of it than I was able. Warhol was one of the first productions to grace the new stage of the Slovak National Opera (SND) and did properly fill the grandiose new space with its three story decorations.

Soloists and Choir During Everest Ballet of SND in Bratislava:
multimedia plays a huge role: notice the large projection

photos: Ctibor Bachratý for SND

With Everest, Radačovský has set his sights far higher. Everest seeks to communicate four stages of existence: life, death, after-life and resurrection. But the theology is definitely more pagan than Christian. Everest begins with the crawling and fluttering of Lemurans, the half-animal half-man inhabitants who antedate Atlantis.

To meet these lofty ambitions Radačovský has used more lights and smoke than the flashiest Andrew Lloyd Webber production in the West End. In technical terms Everest is as ambitious a production as I've seen in a ballet theater.

Indeed, Everest is an heir more to the musical than to ballet.

To that end, Radačovský recruited as collaborators Slovak pop legend Pavel Hammel (Prúdy) and drama director Patrik Lančarič. Other members of the core creative team included the lyric writer Vlado Slivka, photographer Andrej Balco, film director Marián Kleis (here as originator of the libretto) and set designer Marek Hollý. Both Hollý and Slivka come from the world of advertising.

So Everest is the creation of two advertising pros, a television director, a theatre director, a pop composer, an alternative photographer with Radačovský a lifelong high dance performer.

Natália Némethová Performing in Everest, Ballet of SND

If that sounds like an eclectic mix it is. I'm not certain if the schizophrenia between high art and commercial art ever does resolve itself.

I've read Slivka's lyrics carefully. They are alternately beautiful and banal.

Sad Clown is a good example:

Moon is still silent
Having turned off our dreams
Wrapped sorrow in black talk
The silent strange fool

The sun still shines
Fails to see it should stop
Scorches and shines on our world
But the light in the eyes is gone

Every day is full of desires
Suddenly they disappear
Hope is vain and life is mean
It takes everything away

Alas, the last two lines about life being render the whole lyric maudlin. Perhaps the original Slovak is better.

In musical terms, the upside of Everest is a live choir (actually not part from the SNO but a religious choir from nearby Pezinok). The downside is the score. Unlike the lyrics who rocket back and forth between camp and profound, the music remains resolutely shallow. The pop cliches of sad moans and synthetic chords don't match at all the wonders we see on stage. For me, the recurrently cheesy pop soundtrack is the bane of the show.

In the beginning, Everest contrasts the bustle of the city and ethereal retreat. In the city sections the dancers tear back and forth on the stage, stopping only to turn one another upside and down and run further.

In the ethereal retreat, the fog machines are left to run while lasers move slowly up and down through what looks now like rocking clouds. An amazing effect.

Soloists and Choir Veiled by the Fog During Everest, Ballet of SND

Up until half time, though we see scant little dance after the crawling of the Lemurans. The piece is more made up of still-life and effects. The effects are so strong that one feels one is inside a life size videogame just in front on stage.

In the second half, there is more movement, but for the most part the choreography seems more like something out a music video than a good use of classical dancers. There's a lot of rolling around on the stomach and pushing one's self off the ground.

Again we meander through the clouds and lasers. One can become thoroughly entranced in the technology as one floats through rolling mountain clouds with the dancers.

Finally the full cast strolls slowly out and lays candles at the front of the stage. As a group they perform a synchronised choreography. As beautiful as the gestures are one wonders if it might be better to offer counterpoint here as Balanchine does in his group figures, rather than an identical motion.

Katarina Košíková with Soloists and Choir in Everest Performance, Ballet of SND

Regardless, I was suitably impressed and really began to enjoy the dance. At the back of the stage, there is a miniature mountain. Some of the dancers head back to it and dance their way up to the top. With all the dancers clad in white with ethereal expressions on their faces, it's like a co-ed Bayadere as they ascend.

On the main stage, a beautiful little girl wanders, occasionally met and comforted by Košíková. The girl's fragility and loneliness and expressiveness moved the entire audience. Superb casting.

But this splendid scene was the end and not the beginning. When the lights come down only the candles burn alone at the front of the stage. A wonder how after all the lasers and fog, a lighted row of forty simple candles can touch an audience so deeply.

Performances

No character single character communicates enough emotion that one really falls fully into the story.

In particular, lead dancer Katarína Košíková is very cool and emotionless. Her dancing is more like a fine figure skating performance: her arms simply don't speak.

Katarína Košíková in Everest Performance, Ballet of SND

As she is on the stage most of the night, this is a real problem. A dancer of magnetic charisma and eloquent arms might change one's perception of the whole piece. Very strange that Košíková comes off so cool. She is a voluptuous dancer with a beautiful figure.

While her partner Peter Dedinský is underwhelms less than Košíková, one does not feel his presence strongly. He is adequate but not compelling. In the second cast, I have higher hopes for Barbora Kubátová who danced conspicuously well in the corps on the night of the premiere. There were two or three other long armed dancers in the corps-de-ballet who looked like they might deserve a chance at the lead.

Barbora Kubátová and František Kvačák in Everest, Ballet of SND

It may be I'm just not perceiving the music correctly and Radačovský et co. already have a major international hit on their hands. I hope so. Still, there is a long hiatus between now and the spring performances during which substantial changes could be made. If I were the producer, I'd keep the concept but change the music almost throughout the whole piece. I would be inclined to keep the choir but make better use of them. Then on a stronger score, I'd up the dance quotient significantly. Finally I would cut a few scenes to tighten the piece.

At that point, Everest's summit would be in plain sight. The Slovak National Opera might have a touring hit on their hands.

For now, I feel Radačovský has just reached Everest's basecamp. But without serious changes he won't reach the peak.

In all cases, I resolutely applaud his ambition to do something which breaks out of the ordinary. Radačovský has not taken the easy path to restage yet another grand classic. Or to pat together the traditional minimalist Forsythe or Kylián reproduction so popular on the world's ballet stages now. As an ex-NDT principal, it would only be so easy for him to do.

Instead Radačovský aimed directly for the world mainstage with a peculiar hybrid ballet and musical and moved an entire company to follow him on this perilous path. Despite its flaws, Everest is a brave and daring production for the Slovak National Opera and offers much hope for the future.

If nothing else, the season opener at Tanzquartier was extremely ambitious. Ten different performance venues in the TQW Studios, Halle G, Jungl, museumquartier21, the courtyard of MQ.

There were over twenty different performances in these venues starting at six. The performances offered a cross section of almost everything we've seen in TQW in the last five years. The evening was meant to be more inclusive than exclusive, a chance for the new director to work with all the resident choreographers and performance hangers on of TQW.

I managed to see about seven different shows. Here are my impressions.

Willie Dorner is still interested in stacking human bodies. His excellent bodies in urban spaces which has travelled the world in the last three years, is here brought indoors. The new shapes and movement of the piled dancers, were somehow more subtle and refined than what he showed in the street.

Willi Dorner above under inbetween 2

Willi Dorner above under inbetween 4

Willi Dorner above under inbetween 6

The street is more exciting, as one must chase the performance, but the exercise remains interesting. One feels though that this direction could perhaps have evolved more in the last few years.

The live dance demo of toxic dreams was juvenile interactive fun where people could learn to dance according to projected video in front of their peers.

Toxic Dreams YouToxicTube

The feature show was Oleg Soulimenko's "elegy for the brave". elegy for the brave concerns itself with the loss of youth and the gaining of consciousness. Oleg has his performers play with distorted voices à la Chris Haring. There is a lot of talk, lots of movement but little dance.

Magdalena Chowaniec Alexander Deutinger

Oleg Soulimenko Magdalena Chowaniec Alexander Deutinger 1

As generation X moves into middle age Soulimenko's final lament rang loud and true: "Until I was thirty six fucking was the most important thing in my life. Now art is in the first place and fucking only second. How long will it stay that way?" I liked the piece largely based on the focus and energy of performance from Soulimenko and Magdalena Chowaniec. The third performer Alexander Deutinger - the only Austrian - was more a cipher than a personality.

Oleg Soulimenko Magdalena Chowaniec Alexander Deutinger 4

Soulimenko performs several times is rather charming circus stunt of a headstand on a motorcycle helmet ending in a crash to the ground.

Oleg Soulimenko helmet stunt 3

Paul Weniger and Elastique hit the stage immediately after with a sort of drone industrial which was so loud it nearly blew us out of the hall. The intensity was impressive but one's eardrums counted the minutes during Wolf Ekstase.

Paul Weniger and Elastique 2

Franz Hautzinger

Easily the most impressive piece of the evening was the extract from Anne Juren's co-creation Komposition which features herself, Marianne Baillot, Alix Eynadi, Agata Maszkiewicz (wow these Polish names are difficult to spell).

Anne Juren Marianne Baillot Alix Eynadi Agata Maszkiewicz

Four women gather together in a standing group to just stroke one another. There is a light window blowing which ruffles their hair ever so softly, as softly as their hands move against one another.

Anne Juren Marianne Baillot Alix Eynadi Agata Maszkiewicz 4

The women wear fencing attire which suggests the combative nature of tenderness. Often there is a danger and element of sportive combat in love making.

The work is unbelievably tender. The first section is how I imagine women wished to be touched by their partners, whether man or woman. The second section is explicitly sexual, rough handling of one's another's genitals and anus. Shocking contrast with the first section. This was the way men often grab for a woman or one another. The lifts were beautiful and fit into what Wille Dorner had shown us, but it wasn't entirely clear how the beautiful lifts fit into the discourse on touching. I'd like to see the full piece sometime.

Anne Juren Marianne Baillot Alix Eynadi Agata Maszkiewicz 5

Apparently Juren's composition is for rent as a touring piece, but the ladies are not getting as many offers as they'd like. I highly recommend that curators take a second look and see the beauty of this piece. I hope these pictures will help, as apparently the promotional video is very poor. In person the piece is stunning.

Anne Juren Marianne Baillot Alix Eynadi Agata Maszkiewicz 6

The next piece took us into the back studio of Tanzquartier and the extreme limits of dance performance. Finnish performer Satu Herrala and landscape architect Verena Holzgethan make rolls of masking tape fill up the room. Perhaps the best moment is the first when eight rolls of tape drop suddenly from the ceiling.

Satu Herrala Verena Holzgethan Enclosure in the atmospheric middle

After this shock the two performers attend to making the tape into a living sculpture.

Finally they come back and wrap up their masking tape jungle.

Landscape architect Verena Holzgethan with dancer Satu Herrala
brings us back the grim reality of daily life: it was all just masking tape

The whole exercise is accompanied by soothing electronic sound from Hannes Köcher and beautiful light fragments from Klaus Rink.

I loathe this sort of installation masquerading as dance under the aegis of performance. But if you must show this kind of work, Enclosure/study #3/ was executed with great seriousness with gorgeous shapes and forms and atmosphere. The effort to make an everyday banal object like masking tape a high aesthetic form was successful.

I do not think TQW is the right venue for this kind of work. It's installation not dance.

From here the evening took a brief turn downhill, with a surprisingly flat performance from the Superamas. The Superamas ended up all in guerilla suits, telling us their stories through dance. Someone comes from Brazil, someone comes from Poland, the announcer is a sleazy French guy in lounge clothes.

Tanznacht audience Halle G

Guess what? Dressed up in gorilla costumes a dancer can't do much. The one highlight was an energetic belly dance with just a guerilla mask. Delightful kitsch. But as a whole Nobel Prize in Dance seemed just another silly stunt from the Superamas.

Superamas gorilla girl

Superamas gorilla bellydance 2

Fanny Brunner and Hans Jürgen Hauptmann brought us another stunt in their own skit dreizehnterjanuar. A lady bodybuilder is fought over by a male bodybuider and an old guy who looks almost homeless with greasy hair. Background music is Tschaikowsky's The Nutcracker. It sounds like more fun than it was. I'm sure someone finds all this deconstructionist mockery of dance extremely engaging. To my mind, having read literature in university, it just seems tired.

Hans Jurgen Hauptmann Robert Steijn Fanny Brunner

The party closer was an extended parody concert from of all people Superama bopper Magdalena Chowaniec who performed in at least three full shows that night. Magdalena assumes the persona of mariamagdalena, lead signer of The MOb.

MOb Magadalena Chowaniec

Magdalena Chowaniec

Chowaniec reminds one of Blondie's Debbie Harry, in image and in singing style. I remember the original Heart of Glass even now from teenage years. Hopefully Chowaniec hasn't inherited Harry's drug problems by osmosis, although her antics are crazy enough. She bites her microphone, does slam leaps from the stage, sings and screams and hollars and flings herself all over the stage. Her supporting musicians (Erich Horn, Joe Albrecht, Dorian Cantele) make a solid effort - particularly the Horn on guitar - but they can't match Chowaniec's frenzy.

Erich Horn Magdalena Chowaniec

MOb Joe Albrecht

Magdalena Chowaniec 5

Why someone wants to pretent to be a rockstar and what instructive value Fixing Freedom Tour remains a mystery to me. One only need turn on MTV to see all of this as a true story every day. On the other hand, the performance is good enough that the parody takes on a second life as genuine rock entertainment.

Magdalena Chowaniec 4

MOb Erich Horn 1

Chowaniec and The MOb threw the audience into ecstasy before DJ Bernhard Fleischmann took over for a superlative set which went on to four in the morning. Fleischmann carefully splices together melodic rythms from the last twenty years, taking the atomospher ever higher until the very end, where he wound us down rather quickly over 25 minutes. Unlike star DJ DSL, who's been playing most of the big TQW parties over the last four years, Fleischmann is concered with atomosphere and feeling and his own dogmatic house and drum and base.

Erste Tanznacht Wien dancing 2

The whole evening was a success as an event. Lots of fun to be had with multiple venues, lounges and bars all over. As a live introduction of the director to the last five years of TQW, it revealed what TanzQuartier has become: more little comedy skits and installations than dance. Erste Tanznacht Wien underlined just how far TQW has to go to be a serious home for dance again.

As Vienna, in a period of funding cutbacks, doesn't have many other homes for contemporary dance, it would be better if TQW would fulfill its dance mandate sooner rather than later.

All photos taken by and copyright Alec Kinnear. Please contact me if you would like to reuse or need originals.

Duo by Andras Lukacs & Alice Firenze

The good news is that Lukacs' piece Duo while short was the most emotionally moving of the works danced that night. Duo is simplicity itself: rich purple costumes covering just the torso (Mónika Herworth) and a simple dark stage. The lighting was atmospheric but at the same time clear. We weren't squinting in the dark.

The emotional character of the work had much to do with the music of Max Richter (from the Blue Notebooks) and with Rafaella Sant'Anna's performance. She is in the prime of young womanhood, a powerful dancer with graceful curves.

Her scissors in the air cut sharp like steel. Generally Sant'Anna carried her role with the class of a Paris Opéra étoile, though her footwork could sometimes be more accurate.

The Brazilian Sant'Anna has been in the Staatsoper a long time but despite her dramatic gifts and natural talents has been left to drift much of the time. Whenever she has had the opportunity to dance outside the corps she has always shone. It's nice to see her have this chance on the main stage.

While emotionally cooler than Sant'Anna, her partner Masayu Kimoto supported her performance with élan. He was always in the right place and handled his lifts as though effortlessly.

Ederlezi by Maria Yakovleva & Mihail Sosnovschi

The opening piece of the evening Ederlezi from choreograph Myriam Naisy was quite the opposite. Shrill, bathetic music as if from a second rate Hollywood melodrama bathed the audience in bathos. Goran Gregovic must take the blame. The choreography did little to rescue the situation, despite some pretty lifts, particularly notable when Kirill Kourlaev held Irina Tsymbal horizontal over his head in an acrobatic pose. To their enormous credit, both handled this visually effortlessly.

Ederlezi by Roman Lazik & Karina Sarkissova

Glow was a more ambitious work than either of the first two, with a cast of twelve dancers. Musically, choreographer Jorma Elo reaches directly for the sky, mixing a Mozart symphony and a Philip Glass's concerto for piano and orchestra. The music was live making Glow a perfect fit for the Vienna Staatsoper, which may have the best ballet orchestra in the world. Unlike other ballet orchestras, the Staatsoper musicians have the opportunity to play a mixed repertoire and do not become as jaded and cynical in their playing.

The piano playing by Lucas Mais was superb: you could have closed the curtains. Anything that happened on stage was a bonus to the concert level playing.

Olga Esina showed up the entire cast with her long arms Dancers like Olga Esina are the reason to justify a trip to St Petersburg or Moscow to see the Marinsky or the Bolshoi. Kudos to Gyulo Harangozo for bringing Esina to Vienna and keeping her her. When you see her on the program, don't miss the ballet. Kirill Kourlaev was the best of the men and partnered Esina adequately but for the moment the Staatsoper haven't found a man to match Esina. The search goes on though: she will be dancing Swan Lake with four different partners in October and November.

Glow Stop by Ketevan Papava & Alexis Forabosco

Of the other women in Glow - Stop, Ketevan Papava's long arms nearly matched Esina, but her movements have a more deliberate and posed feel. I prefer the natural and effortless style.

Throughout Glow - Stop, the dancers mix and pair and mix again, like the river of life which brings people together and takes them apart.

At the end of Glow - Stop, the last dancer makes some small mechanical gesture with his arms and hand, as it the dancers are marionettes. We are just puppets moving frentically through life driven by our feelings.

Slingerland is a short duet by William Forsythe, originally staged on Stefanie Arndt who came to pass the role on to Olga Esina. Esina this time was paired with Eno Peci. Strangely, while both of these dancers are very talented, something did not work in this performance. Stefanie Arndt is a very angular and sharp dancer. Esina has a silky smoothness to almost all her gestures, even when stacatto. Her grace is out of place in the brittleness of Forsythe's later works. Eno Peci is more at home in this idiom but he never seemed to hit full speed, nor was the any extraordinary chemistry between them. With all of the caveats above, Slingerland is the kind of work of which there should be more of in the Staatsoper repertoire and both Peci and Esina did sufficient justice to their roles. It's just the trifecta Forsythe-Esina-Peci raised higher expectations on paper. The music didn't help as it was a scratchy grinding bit of modern composition from Gavin Byers which irritates far more than it engages.

Slingerland pas de deux by Eno Peci & Olga Esina

Slingerland by Eno Peci & Olga Esina

The end of the evening was given to Juri Kylian with two of his masterworks, Petite Mort and Six Dances.

Petite Mort involves swordplay and fake dresses and great swooping pieces of fabric which are carried across the stage, set to sweeping Mozart concertos (Nr. 21 and 23). A lot of Petite Mort's effect is based on visual gags and surprises. I've seen it a few times, perhaps in Paris as well. To be frank, it was a disappointment for me last night. The men were very sloppy with their swordplay, not in sync. They didn't seem to have any military discipline in their timing. The women didn't move me either. Petite Mort did not seem to have the precision necessary or to be fully rehearsed. Had it been the first time I'd seen Petite Mort, perhaps I would have sufficiently delighted by the eye candy and visual surprises to forgive many of these faults. I've seen it danced better elsewhere. Staastsoper should be dancing work like Petit Mort, so I'd like to see them go back to the rehearsal room and get it right.

Petite Mort by Karina Sarkissova & Mihail Sosnovschi

Petite Mort by Rafaella Sant'Anna & Jaimy van Overeem

Six Dances is again the duo Kylian - Mozart, but this time in an overtly comic context with white pancake makeup on the dancers. Juri Kylian has a secret fascination with the word of slapstick silent comedy. He indulges this passion to the hilt with six dances. The dancers drove the staid audience to laughing out loud and put a smile on my own face. Under the white face I couldn't tell who was who among Alice Firenze, Gabor Oberegger, Céline Weder, Marcin Dempc, Iliana Chivarova, Thomas Mayerhofer, Liudmila Trayan and Richard Szabó but nobody danced badly. The danseuse who opened up Six Dances was perhaps the funniest of all. In addition to his talent for creating beautiful and emotional movement, At the end of Six Dances beautiful soap bubbles float down from behind the stage. The dancers look up and are surprised. They share their surprise directly with the audience, looking us in the face and shrugging their shoulders as if we were there on stage with them. And interesting breaking of the third wall before the curtain closes on their strange mime world.

Sechs Taenze by Mayerhofer & Chivarova & Szabo

Sechs Taenze by Trayan & Oberegger & Dempc & Firenze

New World Dances is the closest I've seen Staatsoper come to one of those splendid Opera de Paris Palais Garnier evenings of contemporary choreography. Never mind that most of the creations here were made in 1980's. There are a couple of newer pieces and this is a huge step in the right direction. There should be one or two of these evenings made every season. Costume ballets and classics are fine but to breathe a major ballet company needs this work too. I'd like to see newer works and less name choreographers but perhaps to sell contemporary choreography to the Viennese audience, it's a necessary evil.

All photos copyright © Das Ballett der Wiener Staatsoper and Volksoper/Axel Zeininger

In other words: "A long wool coat in navy with worn over a sweater with a soft collar worn with peach leather pants and pointy red nubuk shoes".

In other words, you know this piece will be frivolous before you even get there. Frivolous not as in pointless, but frivolous as in the écume des jours (Froth of Days) of Boris Vian.

The stage is bare, without curtains.

The dancers enter from the house, each dressed in the sports clothes of the down on their luck, carrying a large plastic bag. Certainly from not such a good neighbourhood, ordinary folk. They begin by stripping off the ordinary clothes and showing off their very showy bodies.

Nadine Fuchs does gymnastic stretching in pink lingerie, staring matter-of-factly at the audience.

Delgado Fuchs © Sophie Ballmer

You can see this pair are either making the requisite sacrifices for their art. Neither of them has an once of fat on either stomach or hips. Either that or they hate food.

We are now firmly in the domain of the unpredictable. The conventional down on your luck dancer in sweatclothes to world class gymnastic stretching, it's extremely unclear where this is going. In the background there is very faint music.

dress change © Alec Kinnear

Now they dress themselves up in something else again. Marco is in black tie and patent leather shoes, his strange long hair making him look like an out of work British rock idol from the eighties.

Nadine puts on green hotpants and a lacy cowgirl shirt with tall boots. The pair circle one another warily, begin to dance and kiss. Nadine flings herself passionately on Marco but then starts to pull herself higher on his chest still thrusting her hips at him.

They make us believe for a moment it might be real passion and then it just changes into absurdity again.

Nadine Fuchs
by Catherine Leutenegger

Eventually the pair get to talking. Nadine speaks about Marco to the audience in first person.

"He got his start in dancing at a club in Brussels called Happy Fee, a strip club," she accuses him. At this point Marco is down to bare chest and black pants again. He lingers over at the side of the stage.

"Marco is waiting for a moment," continues Nadine. "A moment where the positive energy of the moment and the body come together." It's hard to tell if she is serious or not.

When Marco begins to dance now, slow turning movements, a spine sloped backward, hands at awkward angles, we get contemporary dance improvisation 101. Both Fuchs and Delgado are mocking their opponents, the earnest contemporary brigade.

Delgado is clearly comfortable and in control of the idiom which makes his mockery of it all the more delicious. At the end of his parade across the stage he stops and stands in one place. Fuchs strolls by to make some adjustments and distorts his face, before moving his arm into a grotesque thumbs up position.

grotesque thumbs up position © Alec Kinnear

Delgado's distorted half clown face makes us wonder about the poses we make and the poses people want to put us into.

A little bit later they find their way to naked and dance across the stage holding one another's crotches. From naked Delgado and Fuchs move to a pink sixties outfit for Fuchs and head to toe blue tails for Delgado.

naked Delgado and Fuchs © Alec Kinnear

Curiously as soon as they are perfectly attired they set to meticulously rebuilding the stage with metal and wood. On stage, they left to life size photos of themselves. Each photo includes a hole in the wood for a self-portrait like in the surface.

self portrait © Alec Kinnear

"I'm thirsty," proclaims the pink Fuchs. "We'll be up in the bar enjoying a drink. Anyone else who would like to have a drink too, come and join us."

Delgado hands someone in the front row a polaroid camera and then they both walk up through the audience and out of the theatre.

The audience sits in stunned silence for about thirty seconds and then they start to go for the self portraits.

The perfect anti climax. We are left taking pictures of ourselves in the cutout clothes of the two leads.

Marco Delgado
by Catherine Leutenegger

I wondered about whether it was necessary to include Marco Delgado's biography in the piece. I asked Delgado about it: "Who says it's my biography?," he smiled.

That bit of stagecraft - breaking the line between the real and the imaginary seems to me to be at the core of manteau long en lain marine. Delgado and Fuchs want to take the stage back from earnest explorations of your real internal self to the magic of let's pretend.

The constant costume changes are a reminder that surfaces are just that and that one's impressions of someone are only clothes deep. This simple paradigm of blurring reality and fashion wakes the world up. You wonder who you really are and who the people you know really are. For at the end of the day, you are the sum of your clothes and your presentation.

Or at least much of the world works like that. manteau long en lain marine is a wonderful voyage into appearances and the unpredictable.

Even nudity is anything but clarity in this show.

Seen a second time, some of the magic comes off. The jokes turn out to be more closely timed than you think and less spontaneous. The improvisation and unpredictable is actually carefully choreographed.

But it is amazing how Fuchs and Delgado manage to maintain that feeling of unpredictable spontaneity most of the time. I asked Marco Delgado about it - "The freshness is essential. It is sometimes hard. We are often changing the show to keep it fresh."

So take this review with a grain of salt. In a month or two, you may see a very different show than the one I saw in Vienna.

The creators and cast of The Love Piece provide an environment and a context and the rest is up to you.

The Love Piece: Where it all happens

The experience for the most part is positive, but as I wrote the quality of your experience depends mainly on you and what you bring to that evening.

Here's what the program says about the piece. This much is public knowledge:

The Love Piece unfolds along a loose score that can described as: there as many audience members as performers. As they come in, audience members are each taken by the ahand by a performer, who for the duration of the show 'give love' to his/her audience. What such a love can be, is the stake of the piece. Love songs are playing the whole time.

There are just 10 performers - so very few people had the opportunity to experience The Love Piece. I was one of that fortunate 100 and will reveal the details to you about my own visit.

*** SPOILERS FOLLOW - PLEASE DO not read farther ***
*** if you expect to attend The Love piece personally ***

When you arrive you are greeted at the door by one of the ten performers. The performers each pick an audience member and lead him or her to two chairs facing one another as you see below.

Once there you sit and the love songs begin.

The one love song which I remember is Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin's Moi je t'aime non plus. There is some soul and disco as well. All the songs are highly suggestive and romantic.

In my case, I was fortunate to be chosen by the pretty Nina Sakic. Why lucky? Apparently there are no gender boundaries. I could have been chosen by the handsome and flamboyant Zvonimir for instance or a jolly but portly chap Pravdan. While I later learned that Zvonimir is a delightful chap, I am set enough in my ways that a half hour listening to love songs in close contact with Zvonimir is not an experience for which I would necessarily want to give up half an hour of life and pay 12 euros.

Otherwise I could have been chosen by a Vienna dancer whom I know. I think working with someone you already know in real life is discouraged. This makes sense. The excitement is in the 30 minutes and the unknown. It would be very different to work with somebody you already know.

Nina and I got off to a good start with her staring deep in my eyes. I had had a coffee to remain in high alert for Rosas dans Rosas so my mind was racing as I sat with Nina. I wanted something to happen so I sat farther, I sat closer, I smiled, I crossed my legs, I uncrossed them in something like seven minutes.

At that point I whispered to her "Is this supposed to be a silent movie?"

"No it's whatever you want it to be."

And we were off to the races. There was no longer a question of trying to seduce her with my eyes or wait to see if she took my hand. We could talk. We talked about love, we talked about meaning, we talked about music. Mostly we talked about the rules of The Love Piece.

Apparently there aren't many. You can do whatever you want but it ends after half an hour.

In my misspent youth in Canada, I'd been dragged into enough strip clubs to know how quickly the songs go by and how quickly the dancers depart (actually they often have special shortened mixes in these clubs to get another two or three songs in per hour, but I digress).

Still when Nina leaned over to me in mid-sentence, briefly squeezing my hand hard, saying quietly and close to my ear "Don't you think we might have spent our time better?", before disappearing, I was quite shocked. She was gone, the others were gone, just the audience was left.

There was no one to talk to about what just happened. Most everyone had left. Fortunately there was a tall dancer from Poland in a green dress who also wanted to talk about what she had experienced. We compared notes. She hadn't spoken much with her partner but had played games with one another's hands.

I had seen others show shadow puppets with their hands and rocked their heads. The reaction was all completely different. Apparently my experience had been the most cerebral and most verbal.

Which is what I had brought to the experience: the language of love, something which has fascinated me since my first introduction to it at thirteen or fourteen. I couldn't imagine spending a half an hour just looking at an object of love. Love is meant to be made. Words were a wonderful way to distract oneself from potential excesses.

Later I had the chance to speak to the dancers about what can and what had happened.

Zvonimir assured me that he had ended up on the floor with a female audience member on at least one occasion. Others had experienced all kinds of strange caresses. Are their boundaries? Yes, if the performer is not comfortable s/he can take the partner's hands away and establish eye contact only.

Sometimes the experience goes south: mainly when there is little contact, rather than too much. But usually it works out well. Every experience is different and unique. Nina feels she learns something about herself every time she performs The Love Piece.

Nina also insists that The Love Piece is all about platonic love and the idea of love and not about physical love. But that's seems disingenous: to recap the music was quiet soul love songs and Serge Gainsbourg with dim lighting.

Perhap that's Nina's idea of platonic love. Certainly not mine.

Regardless, The Love Piece is a engaging surprise. If you haven't read this article - and if you had the chance to see it yourself, you shouldn't have: I did put in a spoiler notice - you should try it out for yourself and be surprised. Even if you have read this article, you don't know who will pick you or how you will react. Try it and see what happens.

What I like about The Love Piece is its experiential nature. I think more and more entertainment will go in this direction. David Fincher's The Game is about experiential entertainment taken to an extreme. There is little left for the wealthy to do than have experiences. And many of them are willing to pay for them. With the impoverishment of the dance world and the capitalistic excesses at the top of the income scale, we are moving more and more into the decadence of the Ancien Regime where dancers and performers were to be experienced first hand.

The Love Piece seems a first tentative step in that direction.

The Love Piece is created and performed by Nino Bokan (HR), Alice Chauchat (F/D), Pravdan Devlahović (HR), Oliver Frljic (HR), Zvonimir Kvesić (HR), Ivana Pavlović (HR), Ivana Roncević (HR), Nina Sakić (HR), Una Vizek (HR). Also appearing in The Love Piece: Krõõt Juurak (EST/A),

Photograph © Alec Kinnear and Alice Chauchat & co.

This is one of three or four professional level two week programs, mainly populated by the DanceWeb dancers. For those not familiar with DanceWeb, it is a program run by ImPulsTanz which brings about forty dancers from around the world to Vienna to study dance at the ImPulsTanz workshops and at the performances as well for free. DanceWeb is one of those great initiatives which changes the world by providing a conduit for international exchange. Often DanceWebbers end up visiting one another across the globe. I have been the guest in Venezuala on a road trip with one of my friends from DanceWeb. This is not untypical. So that is the context of this two week intensive: working professionals from around the world, but with no prior experience dancing with one another.

Some will argue that Transformers should not be critiqued as it is just the results of a workshop. Not so. It is deliberately presented as a stage work and not in laboratory format.

Salamon & De Smedt & Pro Series - Transformers
© Alec Kinnear

Black box stage. Stage environment not accented, more black curtains and shadows than raw backstage. All the dancers are in everyday clothes: blues, reds, yellows, browns. Nothing remarkable.

A curiosity are the wires going into each dancers left ear. More on them later.

The show starts off slowly with heavy breathing moving to amplified shch whispering noises and lot of meandering around the stage. The whispering slowly accelerates to quiet howls over the course of twenty minutes. Frankly this warmup session is pretty painful.

We have cute little hobbit "hee hee" noises. Let your inner voice out, seventies kind of primal scream warmup. Definitely useful for ungluing uptight dancers from stiff cultures. Not so entertaining.

accelerating Transformers voices © Alec Kinnear

They now turn it up a notch and go into spasms and fits and real primal screams. Particularly amazing is a guy who looks like one of Ghenghis Khan's lieutenants with long dark hair and high cheekbones. You fear for his life and yours as he screams and thrashes.

Particularly effective is Chris Haring's dancer Alexander Gottfarb who doesn't let the spasms go through his whole body but confines it to one part of his body at a time in a controlled rotation, focusing your attention much better on the nuance. Alexander has an unfair advantage here though as Chris uses spasms as well as part of his stage vocabulary (albeit a small part rather than the whole enchilada as here).

This thrashing and screaming goes on for at least a quarter of an hour.

Somehow it turns into a love-in with dancers merging together and blending with other groups. At first it seems heterosexual but over time same sex couples and mixed threesomes appear. The dancers keep their clothes on but otherwise with the passionate breathing and screams you are witness to a full on orgy. Somehow it is unclear if this is meant to be sensual or off-putting.

When it quiets down the stage goes dark and you think the purgatory is over. Not at all.

The lights slowly come back up and the dancers begin to assault the audience verbally.

contact audience © Alec Kinnear

"Do you know what standing by means while the government kills your fellow man?"
"What about La Hacienda?"
"It is time for a revolution."
"Stop the injustice. Just wake up and stop it."

The dancers come right up to the first row and look in the eyes and shout in the face of the audience. Most of them believe in their revolutionary text and pronounce it with fervour. Quite effective.

They then move up the staircases of Halle G shouting at audience members higher up.

Sho Ikushima © Alec Kinnear

I thought they were all going to leave the theater as in Delgado or The Love Piece, leaving the audience alone to muse on what we just saw. It would have been quite effective.

But no, they made it back down to the stage.

Fairly robust applause when the lights went up, but the audience is mainly fellow dancers and friends - hardly impartial.

One could argue that Transformer is a workshop and not a performance to be critiqued. On the other hand, Eszter Salamon and Christine de Smedt made a conscious decision to present on mainstage and not in a laboratory session.

My neighbour Keith Hennesy complains about these white European kids appropriating the text from the Civil Rights movement (The Last Poets). This critique doesn't seem particularly relevant to me. The issue is with revolution and injustice, not with colour and civil rights. Colour is a very narrow view of injustice which has become as much as an economic issue as one of race.

I could live without the half hour of painful buildup as the young dancers build their nerve up to explode on stage and then do their love-in.

But the peak moments did have a genuine character, enough to make one reflect on what humanity means and the differences between man and beast. Apparently not a lot. A fair enough conclusion. Beasts do less damage to the earth as we do.

I do have issues with the technology used. Apparently the wire into the left ear is actually an earphone attached to an iPod shuffle. Each dancer has a soundtrack with both noises and instructions on it, to guide him or her through the performance. For me, giving them a constant hidden soundtrack to perform to is the equivalent of cheating on exams. Almost all of the sound the audience gets is from the dancers.

The dancers should have learned how to generate these noises unselfconsciously without doping themselves with dialogue in their ears. If the dancers need a conductor or fluffer, that should be provided from the first row.

However, Christine de Smedt says the title Transformers is about transforming those sounds and those instructions from the iPod shuffle into performance. Okay, but this is not really preparing the students for the true internal work on themselves. As a prep exercise okay, but I'm not convinced.

Technology should be used to enhance, not as a crutch. I'd like to ask the participants about how they feel. If any of them read this, feel free to leave a comment about the experience of performing to recorded instructions and audio.

© Alec Kinnear

It should be noted there is scant little dancing in Transformers, but given the sparsity of dancing in the entire ImPulsTanz festival, there appears to be scant need for contemporary dancer performers to be able to dance. If all pro dance workshops go in this direction, we are bringing up a generation of dancer cripples who will be able to do little else than howl and writhe.

Despite that caveat, Transformers is far from the dullest show among this year's mainstage performances. There is movement, there is emotion, there is excitement, there is a point.

Performers:
Sandro Amaral, Tim Darbyshire, Kathryn Enright, Elisabete Finger, Alexander Gottfarb, Arianne Hoffmann, Tahni Holt, Sho Ikushima, Lenio Kaklea, Benjamin Kamino, Igor Koruga, Karen Lambaek, Enora Riviere, Bert Roman, Salka Rosengren, Liz Santoro

Last Touch First © Robert Benschop

The stage opens on the interior of an imaginary eighteenth century manor house, where three pairs are standing. There are window frames and doors to give a sense of place. The whole group are standing on a a great canvas sheet.

The light is sculpted and three dimensional. There is a slight sepia tone, like in the best preserved photos of the period.

Last Touch First mirror scene © Robert Benschop

The music is an atmospheric ting-ting-ting on a piano (Dirk Haubrich). Recorded as far as I could see and hear, rather than live, but still unnerving and compelling.

The trick of Last Touch First is the motion. The motion is unbelievably slow. The cast are all dancing but in stopped time.

The working group was formed on the ruins of Nederlands III, the company of retired stars who can still dance. Apparently it was just not possible to get enough funding to keep Nederlands III running. Jiri Kylian is still disappointed about it, as he was personally very closely associated with the founding.

When you see Last Touch First, you can understand why.

Nederlands III was the very best of Kylian's artists, nurtured over the course of decades into artistic forces. Each of them is able to command a stage alone, there are no beginners or mediocrities. All the dancers are charsimatic and spellbinding performers.

It is hard to believe that such a successful company would be scattered to the winds of time, a horrid reminder of the ageism of dance.

Rather than do what Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker did this year with the restaging of Rosas dans Rosas, and have older dancers do a show written for younger dancers, Kylian uses the special skillset of these dancers to have them control motion.

This is a much better approach to take to working with older dancers: give them work in which they can outperform younger dancers rather than moves which highlight their weaknesses in strength and speed and snap.

I'm still wondering what it all means. But the beauty and strangeness of Last Touch First remains after the noise of the rest of the festival all dies down.

Kylian & Schumacher choreography
© Robert Benschop

The underlying theme appears to be that bourgeois appearances are just that appearances. Under the finery and the well-set tables, each couple is world of primal violence and fractured intimacy. Pretty close to the truth. A mature truth - this is not Romeo and Juliet. But then most of life isn't either.

Revenge is best tasted cold. After the closing of NDT III, Last Touch First was crowned dance production of the year in 2007 in Holland.

Dancers:
Kristen Cere, Pedro Goucha, Cora Bos Kroese, David Cecil Krugel, Ester Karin Natzijl, Michael Scott Schumacher

Petr Ochvat © Georg Blaschke

The idiom is a bit dated and Chaplinesque but strangely compelling. Alas after about ten minutes it's over and two other gentlemen walk out from the back of Kasino. Everything is very cordial, they nod and greet the dancer and then sit down.

We watch the dancer rehearse some more and then a home movie is shown of the three men on stage in a rehearsal studio. The two gentlemen sitting turn out to be a choreographer and a dancer. The sixty year old choreographer Harmen Tromp learned this material directly from the original dancer/choreographer Andrei Jerschik (Linz 1902-1997). And he taught it to the forty year old teacher George Blaschke. Who is now passing it on to the young Czech dancer Petr Ochvat.

Jetzt bist du dran © Georg Blaschke

George Blaschke is a piece about passing material on from one generation to another. Perhaps the passing of choreography should be an impenetrable mystery to audiences. To me it's just a given. That's what happens.

In this context, the pickings here are slim.

Ten minutes of compelling dance and ten minutes of dull rehearsal and ten minutes of rather mediocre film.

On the plus side, I would like to see the dancer perform again. I would like to see more of the choreography again.

I'm not sure about the advisability of taking 12 euros from people for what is a non-show and a rather bare bones demo. Apparently I was in the minority and most of the people attending were actually on a whole evening ticket which included Maguy Marin and so you got a lot of minimalism for your 25 or 30 euros.