Fortunately in German, there’s a much better song than “Happy Birthday”. It’s called “How Wonderful that You were Born” (“Wie schön dass du geboren bist”) by Rolf Zuckowski. We’ve just done a video for our sons’ aunt’s 60th birthday. For that video, I made an English translation as I couldn’t find a good one online. Here is my translation:

Heute kann es regnen,
stürmen oder schneien,
denn du strahlst ja selber
wie der Sonnenschein.
Heut ist dein Geburtstag,
darum feiern wir,
alle deine Freunde
freuen sich mit dir

Wie schön dass du geboren bist,
wir hätten dich sonst sehr vermisst.
Wie schön dass wir beisammen sind,
wir gratulieren dir, Geburtstagskind!

Unsere guten Wünsche
haben ihren Grund:

bitte bleib noch lange
glücklich und gesund.
Dich so froh zu sehen,
ist was uns gefällt,
Tränen gibt es schon
genug auf dieser Welt.

Wie schön dass du geboren bist,
wir hätten dich sonst sehr vermisst.
Wie schön dass wir beisammen sind,
wir gratulieren dir, Geburtstagskind!

Montag, Dienstag, Mittwoch,
das ist ganz egal,
Dein Geburtstag kommt im Jahr
doch nur einmal.
Darum lass uns feiern,
dass die Schwarte kracht,
heute wird getanzt,
gesungen und gelacht.

Wie schön dass du geboren bist,
wir hätten dich sonst sehr vermisst.
Wie schön dass wir beisammen sind,
wir gratulieren dir, Geburtstagskind!

Come rain, snow or storm
no matter, you shine
like rays from the sun
It's your Birthday
today all your friends
will celebrate with you.



How wonderful that you were born,
we would so miss you otherwise,
How wonderful that we are together,
Contratulations, Birthday child {boy/girl}


Our best Wishes
are most serious

Stay long healthy 
and happy. Seeing your
happiness is what we like.
There's tears enough
in this world.


How wonderful that you were born,
we would so miss you otherwise,
How wonderful that we are together,
Contratulations, Birthday {child/boy/girl}


Monday, Tuesday, **Wednesday**
it's all the same
It's your birthday only once
each year. Let us celebrate
until the dawn breaks,
this day we'll dance
and sing and laugh


How wonderful that you were born,
we would so miss you otherwise,
How wonderful that we are together,
Contratulations, Birthday child {boy/girl}

There’s a lot of work to be done on meter and rhyme still to make a finished song, but the language of this translation offers some of the dignity, simplicity and elegance of Zuckowski’s original. Zuckowski is still alive (long may he still thrive) and is considered Germany’s most successful recording artist. Hence “Wie schön dass du geboren bist” should still be under copyright for public performance or recording.

Image of Rolf Zuckowski with the Elbkinderlandchor in 2015 copyright Frank Schwichtenberg and licensed under the GFDL.

[fvplayer src=’//cdn.uncoy.com/videos/Cats-Park-Your-Love-is-a-Sin.mp4′ src1=’/videos/Cats-Park-Your-Love-is-a-Sin.webm’ width=470 mobile=’//cdn.uncoy.com/videos/Cats-Park-Your-Love-is-a-Sin-mobile.mp4′ splash=’//cdn.uncoy.com/images/2013/10/cats-park-your-love-is-a-sin-smash.png’]

If Hollywood can blow up cars and buildings (less and less, more and more done purely in CGI), indie music videos should have the right smash old pianos in the pursuit of art.

Apart from the death of the piano, a quite beautiful and simple video. Like most good videos, there’s a single strong image and it’s followed through consistently. We create and then we destroy. There is no permanence. Echoes of Shelley’s Ozymandias. Even truer in emotional terms. The closest couples often become the most bitter enemies or the most estranged souls on the planet.

More Cats Park videos here (on a technical note, Cats Park should consider hosting their music videos on Vimeo which is a much nicer place for visitors than YouTube).

Here’s a fantastic song which comes with a music video to match, Master Hunter. What’s very special for us at Uncoy is that the video is principally a modern dance performance with Marling playing the guitar in the background. Kitty McNamee did a great job with the duet. But the dance is not as indie a production as the music. McNamee is an LA based choreographer with MSA representation who appears to specialise in opera choreography: the strange thing about the bios is they don’t credit the years for the work.

[fvplayer src=’//cdn.uncoy.com/videos/Laura-Marling-Master-Hunter.mp4′ width=480 height=360]

Marling was a kind of early wonder, hitting the scene under Charlie Fink’s wing at age 18. Here’s another Marling hit from her very early years, “New Romantic”.

[fvplayer src=’//cdn.uncoy.com/videos/Laura-Marling-New-Romantic.mp4′ width=480 height=360]

But if Marling’s sophomore and third albums are folk masterpieces, Noah and the Whale will floor you with The First Days of Spring, a concept album and film, a concept dear to my own heart. Here’s the trailer/first song.

[fvplayer src=’//cdn.uncoy.com/videos/First-Days-of-Spring-Official-Trailer.mp4′ width=580 height=360]

The album goes south in the middle but someone with the ability to create that first song and an album long video deserves some admiration.

The most similar revelatory experiences I’ve had would be Anna Azema’s Le Jeu d’Amour followed by Rachel Smith’s The Clearing or earlier Tori Amos’s Little Earthquake and Van Morisson’s Veedon Fleece.

Sadly I have to start with the video. I first heard the music in the dark without any visuals. Horn’s pretty face and passionate delivery are a distraction from the depth of the song. As much as her profoundly emotional voice, it’s the guitar works which makes Under löven work.

When I first listened to Under Löven, I couldn’t figure out how the guitarist managed to be both so quiet and so active at the same time. The video alas reveals his hand immediately. There are two of them on similar guitars.

The other very special musical quality Under Löven has is the pacing. The percussion picks up its feet and moves more quickly in the middle. Then the percussion pauses and slows down. The speed of the song seems to have a life of its own. I don’t know why this changing of pace is not used more. I think Jim Croce might have done something similar in the past.

Which brings up another important part of Melissa Horn’s acoustic sound. It’s really acoustic. There are four badly washed Swedish musicians in the crowded studio with her. They play the two guitars, a stand up bass, an single muted tombola drum and cymbal and a very strange and small table top piano.

This motley crew has no synthesisers, minimal post-production treatment. It’s six people making sound together like Anna Azema’s Troubadors from seven hundred years ago. We are in direct contact with the sound.

The blessing of modern technology is that many of us in our own homes have listening technology which lets us enjoy this music almost as if live. Even fifty years ago would have had to travel hundreds of kilometers in the past to attend a concert like this, if we wanted to hear more than a rough approximation.

Speaking of anachronisms, the guitarist on the right really amuses me. Grubby black beard, lanky dark hair, horrid hairy chest, wan skin. He’s like something straight out of the nineteen seventies. Think Stevie Nick’s era Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham. Time has changed so little, fashion as empty a pursuit as whist.

And to return to Melissa Horn herself. Like Stevie Nicks, through her voice as if she has a direct connection with the universe and the creator. It’s other worldly, too true and too deep to be human. When Tolkien wrote about Elven wisdom, he meant something like this.

I don’t speak Swedish and I haven’t looked up the words. Under Leaves, I understand of course, although at first I thought it meant Under Lions and I think I liked that even better. With German, Russian, French and native English, I can understand something. It appears Horn is speaking to someone with love and regret, lamenting the temporality of relationships but rejoicing that sometime and some place light comes into our lives.

As long as I don’t know what she sings Under Löwen remains whatever I feel it is. So I’m reluctant to find out. Hearing music like this makes me want to learn Swedish, helps me understand what the hell Julian Assange was thinking while wandering trains in Sweden but makes a strange trait of the Swedish musical scene even more of a mystery to me.

When Swedish singers have such a beautiful language of their own, what are they doing writing clumsy songs in English? The international music industry remains reluctant to let you in regardless of the English songs. The Americans have it in a stranglehold and second rate English songs are not going to change that. Melissa Horn is setting a strong and bold example of writing profoundly and beautifully in your own language.

In the end, songwriters and musicians only have one life. Use it to create the most beauty you can. That probably means working in your own idiom.

And again Melissa Horn. As she sings, one understands why the Greeks chased the Trojans back to Troy. Women like Horn are why bards write sonnet cycles, the 19th century novel exists and what drove Rohmer and Truffaut to make their films. On the dark side, beauty like this causes men to seek control of fortunes, launch wars or commit suicide.

Ironically in spite of this post, I hope Horn does not become too popular. True artists like Horn are night flowers: too much light burns their leaves. She needs to be free to live her life and develop her feelings without paparazzi and the Daily Mail following her around. Tori Amos and Van Morrison later became extremely private and were able to create further and live there lives so there is hope.

This moment in time is stopped and held in the video above. No matter what happens. Strangely the two camera video with just a wide and a close in the gloomy studio is more than enough. No CGI needed, no heavy make up. Minimalism reveals talent (or its absence, hence so much overblown production). Her musicians are great, her sound engineer is brilliant and her video crew know just what to do. Thank you to all of you for this moment.

PARA – Žena from Martina SLOVAKOVA

Things are happening culturally in Bratislava, a lot of the work is just underground.

In the narrow street of the old town in the video (it’s just south of Michalska Brana and the Oesterreichisches Institute is on that street), last weekend I saw two guys catch another guy drag him down and kick him three times in the head. After the victim ran right past me.

They kicked him once but it took me twenty seconds or so to recruit a group of about three other people to help intervene. From our group somebody found some police, who then called backup. The attackers were spoiled boys with rich fathers in black designer suits. The victim had pierced ears, punky hair and had insulted them, his beating was justified they insisted. Everyone was about twenty years old.

Friends of the brats arrived, girls in black mini dresses with long dark hair and lots of makeup. Friends of the punky guy arrives, slightly alternative girls with no makeup and normal guys. Based on my statement, the police started to arrest the privileged kids who were trying to tell everyone they hadn’t done anything. Then the punky guy head butted one of them sending the BCBG (bon chic bon genre) slamming into the police car and bloodying his nose. Handcuffs and a reversal of the situation.

At this point, the spoiled kids were home free.

After lots of talking to the police, we managed to get the punky kid released and everyone went home with no charges. A lot of trouble for nothing.

Lesson: do not headbutt your assailants in front of the police (or attack them in anyway). You will really weaken your case.

I wonder if the spoiled rich kids learnt anything. The two guys seemed really comfortable chasing people down, kicking them in the head and dealing with the police. Let’s hope this isn’t the future.

Hence Lachambre’s work has always appeared conceptual and fairly painful to me. In the best case, instructive or prophylactic, like a trip to the dentist. The tangy taste I had of his work with Clara Furey at the Franz West Tribute did inspire me to attend a full show. What impressed me there was his intensity. Lila, under Lachambre’s mentorship for the summer, told me that his main speech to DanceWeb was all about intensity on stage. A very good point to make.

Benoit Lachambre Snakeskins: LaChambre is bottom left, Albanese is bottom left
Rowe is on top of the rig pounding a thunder sheet
photo Christine Rose Divito

In “Snakeskins”, Lachambre begins by hanging upside down in a harness under a vast set of cables which dip four metres out to the audience. On the left of the netting is a guitarist with some computers and sound decks. As Lachambre waves his arms and the cables move, he appears to be flying like a giant bird. As he flies the music soars.

Throughout the piece Hahn Rowe’s sound is incredible. The closest equivalent which comes to mind (without Frip’s vocals) would be King Crimson. Or the Canadian band Black Emperor. Rowe for extended passages even plays his guitar with a bow like a classical violinist.

Lachambre removes his harness later and through the piece changes his clothes several times, each time taking layers away like a snake. Occasionally he has a mask on, occasionally his face is naked. At points the guitarist dons a frightening green metallic mask to keep everyone company.

There is a third man on stage (Daniele Albanese), who is wearing a silver mask and sweat clothes from the beginning. In the one spoken dialogue of Snakeskins, Albanese’s main role is as a sack of potatoes type drunk.

Rowe’s relentless music finally stops. A masked Lachambre bullies Albanese into giving him all his money. “Give me some money,” Lachambre asks. Albanese complies readily enough. The clang of change.

“More,” demands Lachambre with the desperation of a junkie and the touchness of a hood, giving Albanese a sharp kick.

With the money of Albanese in his pocket, Lachambre isn’t interested in Albanese anymore who goes to spend the rest of the show lying in front of a wall sleeping it off.

This wretched scene from the dregs of modern society is a kind reminder to us all: there but for heaven’s graces go I. Each night someone in every city is getting a few sharp kicks a local tough, forced to cough up his last earnings. There are tired broken women wandering around who for the price of a couple of drinks will do whatever anyone wants. Even for the most punctual, homelessness and superfluity are only a natural disaster, a civil war or an American invasion away.

At one point Lachambre is shaking his butt at us and convulsing in latex pants. It’s as if Lachambre feels the audience will be pleased or excited to be offered his butt. A similar offer did work for a long while for Paris Hilton.

Somehow Lachambre manages to put a basketball on his head and a microphone up his nose before springing into his net where he struggles before he breaks free. Now he is on the floor crying like a lost and injured child. Some women left the theatre unable to reconcile Lachambre’s wailing with their expectations of an evening of dance.

Lachambre stops now to tell us a story of “a game the ancients played”. The Mayans apparently played basketball but with vertical hoops. It reminded them of the eclipse. Nice story if both convenient and incredible.

Lachambre when he doesn’t have his mask on, looks very unwell. His hair is long but lifeless, his eyes demon blue and red, his cheeks drawn, his shoulders bent, his skin pasty as the crypt. The only real sign of life, the frenetic energy he radiates from those piercing eyes.

At this point, I’m wondering what drives Lachambre on. For all its intensity, his work is cold, methodical, even soulless. There is little love and no family in his world. Just colours and sounds and nearly random moments. How far we have come from Giselle, surrounded by family, fellow villagers, fiancé before she is seduced and destroyed by the local prince.

Lachambre seems a man who has sold his soul for art. There is no hope, no greater plan. There is just the black box to be adorned and the audiences and festivals to be importuned for ready cash. Another airplane, another crowd. The sun moves in the sky and with its motions Lachambre has drinking money and rent money. This is not a critique: many esteemed denizens of capitalism do far worse. Lachambre is making something and providing divertissement: far better than the brokers who pour mindlessly into stock exchanges daily in to collect from the ebb and flow of financial tides in packs like piranha fish.

But we didn’t come for naught but a bit of music and a homeless skit. The lights go down again as Lachambre divides his net into two halves before starting to swing it. While he whips the nets around faster and faster, laser type lights create will-o-the-wisps patterns on the ropes. The music goes higher and higher, it’s like entering a kind of twilight zone where anything his possible. A small masterpiece of visual stagecraft.

Albanese finally pulls off his own mask. The men take their bows. The audience goes mad for Lachambre. Lachambrism must be some kind of cult – they scream and scream. Even through a dozen false exits and returns. Rowe’s music plays on finally serene. Albanese shows some dance moves too. The men collect their gear and dance around together to show us, they could have said it with movement if they wanted to, they could have danced had they wanted to. Somehow movement and dance are an estranged part of the past in these waters, just as peculiar to these anti-formalists as menuets are to you and I.

The exit scene lasted at least twenty minutes. I think the idea is to exhaust the audience into leaving. At least one tenth of us stuck it out the additional half hour until Lachambre, Rowe and Albanese finally gave up wandering in and out and Rowe shut down the music loop.

Lachambre himself wonders himself if he’s on the right track in his notes about Snakeskins:

I touch the excrement of the definitions I deconstruct. Like a one-man orchestra, with no limits or boundaries, I exist outside all logical description. Am I in the process of regressing or am I in fact highly evolved?

While our aesthetics may be opposed, Lachambre’s politics are perceptive. He spoke in a recent interview about the photograph used on stage of a first nations man in a dark corridor at the end of which we see a small boy with a basketball:

First nation ancestors have not been respectfully recognised in terms of their personal histories and the former nations of the Americas have not been properly dignified by society either, be it in a historical perspective or in contemporary discourse. The rejection of what was the outcome of colonialism created a great deal of pain, anger and lack of balance in and among ancestors and families and in society as a whole.

Yes, it’s an interesting question. How do you live among the people who killed your ancestors, destroyed your nation and took your lands? It’s nigh impossible.

I find stranger and stranger though the word Lachambre used many times: “the Ancients”. There are no ancients. Humankind exists all of a hundred or two hundred thousand years. This earth is in its fifth cycle of life and over a billion years old. We are as fleeting as the moths flying at our porchlights and perishing every night.

Lachambre has no answers. No one has.

Afternoon with a Faun immediately brings memories of Nijinski, the famous photograph. It’s a dangerous standard to lance against. Choreographer Boris Nebyla has never lacked courage and plunges straight in. The stage is spare with just four white ceiling to floor breaking the all black stage, light slips through from behind. At the front of the stage, Mihail Sosnovschi poses front foot under him back leg extended. His powerful physique impresses right away. Sosnovschi strikes a series of poses to Debussy’s music, sometimes balletic, sometimes more from a bodybuilder’s show.

Faun: Mihail Sosnovschi

At this point, one is optimistic about the duet to come. Lovely Brazilian Tainá Ferreira Luiz creeps across the back of the stage between the columns. Her hair is dyed a flaming red and she is clad in a flesh toned body suit.

The pair now pose together and interact in some sort of flirt. It’s all strangely sexless though. From here Afternoon of a Faun just meanders. There’s a hint of hope for some flames when Luiz with her legs extended backwards and on her stomach with Sosnovoschi above juts her hips into the floor three times, as if making love but it’s just a tiny spark in a very tasteful but too benign Afternoon of a Faun.

Faun: Tainá Ferreira Luiz & Mihail Sosnovschi

Bolero is the creation of András Lukács, Hungarian wunderkind of the Harangozo’s regime. Lukács is almost all grown up now and toils no more for choreolab but for the main stage. No excuses now.

In tackling Bolero, once again the choreographer is taking the measure of a musical work greater in the imagination than anything he or she could create.

Cleverly Lukács opens with a closed curtain which is slowly pulled up by a very beautiful Gala Jovanovic, clad in a long black skirt and a set of black beads. Underneath the beads there is a body suit alas. Without the bodysuits, Jovanovic and Lukács could challenge the music. But they’d need another six or seven women up to the occasion.

Bolero: Gleb Shilov & Josefine Tyler

Excellent work on the costumes by Mónika Herwerth.

Gradually the stage fills with other dancers, the men stripped to the waist and in the same long skirts, all the other women in black beads. They cross in impressive, elaborate patterns, their footwork as sensual as Afternoon was cool.

Bolero: Ensemble

The half naked men in skirts cut a more imposing figure than the women, Lukács mixes the dances up between monosex and mixed. As Bolero flames up, the lifts become more challenging, the movement more compelling. An effective slow build which culminates in the whole group quickly disappearing. Again Jovanovic is left alone on the stage, this time at the back in a space between the curtains. The final horn sounds and she slams shut the curtain.

The manoever shows just how much mileage a clever choreographer can get from a minimalist staging.

The audience erupted in felt applause this time, partly for the music and impressive performance of the orchestra under conductor Guido

Florian Hurler stood out among the men for both his physical size and his interesting presence, daring the audience to love him. We saw again Felipe Vieira from choreolab but for some reason he seemed more timid today.

Nothing prepared us for the insanity after the pause. Volksoper Ballet Director Vesna Orlic took her own run at one of the greatest pieces of music ever, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.

The curtain opened to a full choir of seventy filling the entire backstage singing at full voice. Front stage stood a figure in a long dress with forty centimetre bee’s bun hairdo. Under the makeup, stood again the enormous Florian Hurler. He threw his hands up in the air summoning the gods. At this point, around his feet half-dressed figures as if from Spartacus rolled and thrust their legs in the air around Hurler.

As the choir belted out Valkyrie levels of sound, Hurler strutted and posed as if descended from the heavens. The closest pop culture equivalent I can think of is the aria from Fifth Element but that scene is largely insufficient for this enormous stage of music and movement.

The pace did not let up from there. We moved from choral scenes to arias and back again.

The tableaux gradually leaned towards Daliesque: at one point a four metre cross is carried on stage by ten tall collared monks. They put it up and it turns out to glow neon red. The monks sing as a choir around a dinner table on which there is a huge silver roast cover. They slash knives and forks together. The lead priest pulls the silver cover off the food to reveal the very fat head of another opera singer, who sings as if decapitated from the middle of the table. When he is done, the monks cut his head to pieces and eat him alive. Immediately afterwards ten black haired prostitutes run in in garters to fornicate with the monks, who turn out to be wearing can-can dresses under the habits.

The Catholics in the audience sat in silent bewilderment but atheists were happy to see organized religion get its nose tweaked again before the naked bride showed up, as a man dressed in only a black tutu danced the black swan part from Swan Lake, brilliantly danced by Samuel Colombet, reprising a role from a short piece in choreolab three years ago.

The stage turned to reveal an audience of twenty men on benches who had arrived for the black swan’s live sex show with the lady in red, danced by a very seductive Gala Jovanovic.

Immediately thereafter strolled out sixty white clad children hopping and skipping. Then they too broke into high song.

There was smoke, there was fog.

Carmina: Florian Hurler (Fortuna) & Ensemble

If all this sounds unbelievable it was. You’d have to watch Orlic’s Carmina Burana half a dozen times to unravel all the Dali moments. There was an old man and a woman leaving to death, admirably portrayed by Gabriele Haslinger and Percy Kofranek. There was a young couple who took their place.

Carmina: Ekaterina Fitzka, Samuel Colombet, Gala Jovanovic

The end was as powerful as the beginning as Hurler returned in his floor length gown, his powerful arms thrust into the air to summon again the gods and bring an end to this tormented and spectacular evening. Once again limbo’s ghosts rolled around his feet.

It has been many years since I’ve seen such an ambitious production in Vienna, let alone in Volksoper. The closest equivalent was Jan Fabre’s Blood on tour at Tanzquartier.

Karl Regensburger intendant of ImPulsTanz summarised the grandeur: “a spectacle on a scale to greet the departure of Greece from the Eurozone”.

Musically I must mention the soprano work of Beate Ritter. Her voice is heavenly. The male soloists offered solid performances, but Ritter’s voice was the musical highlight of evening, together with the whole choir.

My only concern is that I don’t know what Vesna Orlic can ever do to top this her first full evening piece.

Photos copyright Wiener Staatsballett/Elisabeth Bolius

The singer Martin Achrainer fills each song full of portent and passion. Fans of German lieder would swoon. I hope there’s a compact disc for sale. In his dramatic performance, Achrainer often takes the role of the composer Schubert himself, writing out sheafs and sheafs of music on stage in the first act.

The stage is dramatically decked out with a huge round mirror overhead, about 15 metres across, which can flutter in moments of dramatic importance offering a strange through the looking glass feel. At the front corner of the stage there is an impressionist painting of Schubert’s time. Alas, the painting at 1.5 metres wide is too small to be intelligible and too large not to notice. Most of the lighting is strongly green tinted for some reason. Alas for most of the piece, the lights are also just too bright. I’m no fan of watching dance in the dark, but until the last half hour of the two hour performance, one felt that one was under rehearsal lights and the light technicians went off duty while the choreographer and dancers worked.

Jochen Ulrich Winterreise ensemble

With such bright lights, the large atmospheric candelabra arrangements on stage had little effect.

In spite of the interrogation lights, the dramatic development is extremely difficult to follow. In the beginning there is a stream of beautiful women wandering on stage only to be accosted by pairs of men and disappear. Later when the women reappear on stage they are inebriated and stumbling. Now they are out and out ravished by packs of four and five men. Looking into the program one learns that there’s a bride (Clara Pascual Martí) and her mother (Irene Bauer). Bauer changes costume more than anyone else in the production, strutting gorgeously in high heels and a tight tiny white skirt in her first appearance and with a long spell in the second act in a long black evening gown, an elegant precursor to the flappers. I’ve rarely seen someone dance so well in high heels but as the mother, Bauer is sadly often left to just wander around.

Fabrice Jucquois Irene Bauer Clara Pascual Marti

The cast list continues with a father (Fabrice Jucquois), a sister (Anna Sterbová), a brother in law (Wallace Jones) and an uncle (Daniel Morales Pérez). On the other side we have a groom (Matej Pajgert), his mother (Sarah Deltenre), his father (Alexander Novikov), his brother (Emilijus Miliauskas), his female cousin (Lucia Patoprstá) and his sister-in-law (Marietta Kro). Who all of these people are we really have no idea. They spend a lot of time kissing one another and pulling up the women’s skirts. Kro is particularly winsome in her long dress with her attentive lover Daniel Morales Pérez. Wallace Jones impresses with his tender attentions to his partners male and female in his appearances. Jucquois convinces as a sufficiently dominant patriarchal presence.

Schubert’s personal life was difficult, he often lived abroad. Towards the end of his life he suffered from severe illness and near blindness. But there is no direct equivalent in the Ulrich’s libretto. Ulrich’s starting point was of course Schubert’s music and curiously wedding scenes from the films of Fellini and Kusterica.

Fellini’s mad weddings are difficult enough to comprehend on film. In the theater, one doesn’t have the same chance to change viewpoint or perspictive, unless its via selective light of which we saw little. I’m not quite sure how an early death to syphilis at 31 (Schubert’s fate) is equivalent to incest and rape among the gypsies.

Still the lyrics of the Winterreise songs (the words were not written by Schubert but rather by a poet he admired, Wilhelm Müller or for some of the songs by composer Heinz Winbeck) do support Ulrich’s dark vision:

Heart be still
Why do you hammer relentless
It's the will of the heavens
That I must leave you now.

Of course, with dancers as luscious as Bauer, Kro and Patoprstá one doesn’t always need a linear libretto. The men don’t look too bad stripped to the waist and in black trousers either. Whatever the story, there is far too much walking and too much pantomime. Why they wander and wander in circles is a mystery to me. I can understand that Ulrich wants to experiment with gait, but that doesn’t seem to be his intention. It’s as if we are watching an early walk through where the steps haven’t all been set and the dancers are just finding their places.

Nearly all of these episodes could be energetically danced and bridged with dance. Grigorovich told stories through dance in his ballets, particularly Romeo and Juliet, I don’t know why Ulrich doesn’t want to take the final step and insist the movement tell his story.

No matter how fed up one gets with strutting dancers and the incoherently episodic story, one can always return in the end to Achrainer’s singing.

Besides Achrainer’s fine singing, the musical side had solid support from a good orchestra performance under conductor Takeshi Moriuchi’s energetic leadership. Maaki Namekawa’s solid piano solos.

The final half-hour picks up when the lights go down and something approaching a marriage and the family photo afterwards slowly devolves to surrealistic spinning of the stage while a figure in red silk lies crucified. At one point the feathers are thrown up in the air over the group as dancers pose in the middle giving us the effect of one of those glass snow scenes shaken up as the snow floats down. Later Achrainer plays with a wooden rocking horse in the foreground with dark glasses, slowly going blind and losing his mind.

One wonders why Ulrich waited for the last half hour to do something with the lights and to really work his story.

In the end, no harm is done. For the languid stretches, one can close one’s eyes and just listen to Schubert’s astonishing songs beautifully renderd by both orchestra and singer. Yet if it weren’t for the wonderful music, Winterreise might be judged confusing and over long.

In spite of it all, there is great pleasure in Winterreise. At least Ulrich’s dancers are doing something and there’s great music to hear. Dance life can be much worse: one could be stuck in the Vienna contemporary dance scene, watching dancers sulk in the corner in dirty jogging suits, picking at scabs on their arms. Go to Landestheater Linz instead.

While you’re at Landestheater Li, don’t miss the Promenadenhof next door. There’s a fabulous garden and the traditional Austrian pastries are top-notch.

Having seen Winterreise here in Linz, I’m very curious about the Hamburg Ballet’s version by John Neueimeier from 2001.

For more information about Jochen Ulrich’s Winterreise, including performance dates, photographs and tickets, visit the Landestheater Linz website.

dark side of the lens gulls

dark side of the lens diver

This film is supposed to be about surfing and underwater photography.

For me it is about the sea and it is a paeon to this monument of beauty spanning most of the planet.

I see this and I wonder how we continue to relentlessly despoil this unrepairable wonder with oil spills, deslickers, polluted rivers, radioactive waste.

The wickedness of civilisation, at least in its capitalist extant, is to borrow the profit of today against the misery of tomorrow. Man has been at this a long time though. The folk of Easter Island expired when they consumed their entire food chain.

Even archeology has not been enough to sober world leaders apart from that fleeting glimpse of a president Gore.

But back to the film and the ocean. Don’t miss the splendid soundtrack and the free poetry of the voiceover. Here’s a few strong phrases.

i never set out to become anything particular, only to live creatively…

my heart bleeds celtic blood and I’m magnetised to familiar frontiers…

if i only scrape a living it’s a living worth scraping..

DARK SIDE OF THE LENS

Both words and music strongly wrought by subject and filmmaker Mickey Smith. 

A small SEO thanks to energy drink Relentless for making this possible. Via ISO50.

In the middle 030 drags a bit, it even seems like director Jeppe Kolstrup is going to back off the logical conclusion of his own idea. But no, he takes it to the end. Leaving a clear view of the face of the model to the end is a nice touch.

Flash

Flash

Full length UNCUT version of ‘030’ by The Good The Bad

Sex sells. Especially good sex.