Often Choreo.lab is the ballet highlight of the season at Vienna State Opera. Choreo.lab was originally the brainchild of Vienna Ballet Club founder Ingeborg Tichy-Luger and Staatsoper director Renato Zanella whose first edition took place in 2003. I’ve been fortunate to see each Choreo.lab since 2004 (I believe it was the second one) with full photo essays for many of them. 2017 is another Choreo.lab year (it seems to take place every second year now instead of every year).

Since French étoile Manuel Legris took over the reins at Staatsoper, he’s insisted on rebranding Choreolab as the rather dull “Junge Choreographen des Wiener Staatsballets”. Vienna ballet lovers remain grateful for his enthusiastic support under its new moniker.

Ingeborg Tichy-Luger founder of choreo.lab and Vienna Ballet Club

This year choreo.lab enjoyed a particularly full program at its new venue Theater Akzent on 7 and 8 May.

Continue reading 2017 Junge Choreographen des Wiener Staatsballets at uncoy.

There are few companies in the world who can pull off the first scene of Red Giselle. Boris Eifman puts eight princes on stage in glittering classic princely raimant and eight princesses in exquisite white tutus.

It’s a hallucinigenic and disorienting spectacle to face that many principal dancers at the same time, each dancing his or her grand role. Staatsoper is a particularly beautiful ballet company with the men for the most part fine featured and long limbed. The Staatsoper corps-de-ballet women are slim, soft curved and graceful. Thanks to their pretty faces and fine dancing skills the illusion of eight princes and eight Giselles convinces.

Staatsoper is a better match than Eifman’s own company for Red Giselle as the Staatsoper dancers perform the classics every week and are prettier. Eifman’s own group are a bit shorter and more muscular – primarily modern dancers.

Continue reading Wiener Volksoper: Eifman’s Red Giselle a Triumph at uncoy.

The evening opens with Forsythe’s The Second Detail. When we see works like this, it’s clear Forsythe is such a great choreographer and his current strange experiments become even less comprehensible and more astonishing. But few people cared for Stravinski’s music in the 1920 so perhaps it’s we who just don’t understand.

Horecna Contra Clockwise Witness 1

The Second Detail opens up with a huge bright grey rehearsal space with just the words THE at the front. Thin white horizontal lines dividge the strange into precise grids. The dancers are in the same grey as the floor. I’m not quite sure why Apple is getting away with suing Samsung for packaging as Forsythe had the iPhone and MacBook Air boxing under control back in 1991 in Frankfurt. This is an early great work.

Vienna State Ballet company looks great dancing Forsythe these days.

Continue reading Review: Ballett-Hommage Forsythe | Horecna | Lander at Vienna Staatsoper at uncoy.

Volkoper plays an interesting role in the arts life of the Austrian capital. Viennese love both their operetta and their comic ballet and Volksoper must feed this sweet tooth.

Often the works are either historic pieces or imported. This year Volksoper ballet director Vesna Orlic and Staatsoper dancer and choreographer Andrey Kaydanovsky have collaborated on a new program called Marchenwelt or Fairy Tale World. The two parts are unified by dramatic Russian music, first Modest Mussorgski’s Pictures from an Exhibition and then Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scherezade.

Boris Eder’s brilliant turn as the Genie stuck in a lantern in Orlic’s 1001 Nights

Kaydanovsky has contemporised The Ugly Duckling for his fairy tale. His version includes high fives, industrial agriculture and sport hunting with rifles. And why not? Fairy tales should be timeless.

Ugly Duckling starts well with a turning stage which moves from one egg on stage to three.

Continue reading Marchenwelt Ballett at Vienna’s Volksoper: A Fairy Tale Evening at uncoy.

Galas are often long affairs. And this one was no exception. Manuel Legris was fortunate to be mentored in his early dance career by Rudolf Nureyev during his reign at the Paris Opera. There is a Nureyev gala in Paris and now there is one in Vienna. I still question whether it makes sense to so honour someone who recklessly infected others with HIV but I do understand Legris’s attachment to the teacher who gave him so much.

The evening opened with a fine excerpt from La Sylphide with full decorations, with Maria Yakovleva in the eponymous title role and Masayu Kimoto as her partner. While La Sylphide is always easier to watch in its entirety both were very good and the corps-de-ballet looked good too. An auspicious start.

In John Neumeier’s Vaslaw, Denys Cherevychko carried the lead role.

Continue reading Staatsoper Nureyev Gala: Kourlaev and Tsymbal Shine in Mayerling at uncoy.

Afternoon of a Faun, Bolero and Carmina Burana are Volksopera’s dance corps chance to shine outside the shadow of the main ballet.

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.

Continue reading Volksoper Ballet: Carmina Burana – Afternoon of a Faun – Bolero at uncoy.

Between-Two-Worlds-Maxime-Quiroga

So many people put so much into Choreo.lab to make it happen, to finance it, to create it. Vintner Hvram, every year brings up some of the finest cuvées from Burgenland. From the ambassador’s wives to the professors in the audience, Ingeborg Tichy Luger is a lady very precise in her gratitude. I thought all our grateful hands might fall off when we were done clapping for everyone present and everyone who contributed. Tip to the producer: group the people and fire through the names in a group and let us clap louder for four or five names together.

This year under Choreo.lab under the aegis of Staatsoper and ballet artistic director Manuel Legris was even more ambitious than usual with a full nine pieces in two acts, including two from Fabrizio Coppo.

Choreo.lab veteran Samuel Colombet opened the evening with a Balanchinesque bit of neoclassicism.

Continue reading Choreolab 12 review: Junge Choreographen Des Wiener Staatsballetts at uncoy.

La Sylphide is one of the easiest ballets to perform and one of the most difficult ballets to get perfect. The dangers of La Sylphide are multiple:

• the Scottish setting can seem very campy
• adequate stagecraft to preserve a sense of wonder
• the music can come across as thin and grating
• sufficiently large, gifted and beautiful corps-de-ballet
• the male audience can fail to fall in love with La Sylphide
• the women in the public fail to identify with Effie
• the women in the public can wonder what Effie sees in James

Manuel Legris has gotten it all right with Wiener Staatsoper ballet.

Irina Tsymbal as La Sylphide
All photos courtesy & © Max Moser

The decors are very sober, even a little bit drab.

Continue reading La Sylphide, Vienna Staastoper 2011: Manuel Legris and Irina Tsymbal at uncoy.

In his latest dance confection for Vienna, Staatsoper ballet director has brought us three hiterto never danced in Vienna pieces from master showman Jerome Robbins (née Rabinowitz). Robbins has the most eclectic collection of awards of any of the great choreographers, from an Oscar for film direction (West Side Story) to Tonys for Broadway musicals (Fancy Free, The King & I, West Side Story, The Pajame Game) through a French Legion of Honour.

Robbins likely does not deserve the last one, as the most active namer of names in his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953, leading to the blacklisting of dozens of colleagues and acquaintances (effective professional death).

Fundamentally a showman, first as a performer and then as a creator, Robbins felt that there should not be a divide between commercial artists and high art, i.e.

Continue reading Vienna Staatsoper’s Homage to Jerome Robbins: Broadway meets High Art at uncoy.