Toothache epic | Culture

The Biarritz ballet returns to Madrid and to the theater that always hosts it and where it usually triumphs, like this Wednesday, when the public applauded enthusiastically after the performance of two masterpieces of 20th century ballet music in current versions.

Thierry Malandain (Petit-Quevilly, 1959), founder and artistic director of his ensemble, as a choreographer he stays on the margins of contemporary ballet, and his invention is channeled into choral action, great plastic effects and a certain formal bombast, or stiffness. that wants to translate into exhibition elegance. There is no properly neoclassical context, but rather an absorption of current modes and trends, seeking a distinctive or own style, but at the same time, without disdaining something very French: that educational pretension that sometimes works well, and sometimes not; Let us consider that the two chosen musical works by Stravinsky were premiered, at the time, on French soil. Being that Malandain is, a dance artist with a broad choreutical and philological culture, he very consciously puts in his works elements that help frame the choreographies of a well-structured justification and presented with polish and good dancing. The very young squad came out on top. This show premiered in 2021, was brought to Paris (Chaillot) and generally received praise.

Among the premieres of Bird (choreographed by Mijail Fokin) and Sacre (choreographed by Vaslav Nijinski), as creations, there are three years of distance, but depending on where we approach it, as aesthetic entities, there may be many more or a little less. The powerful quality and strength of both scores has generated, in just over a century, a multitude of versions in the most diverse styles. Making them coincide in the same program is risky (the composer dreamed of it in his day, and he partially achieved it, by bringing the suites from both ballets together in concert). In modern times, Maurice Béjart did it twice with his own choreographies: first on January 30, 1979 at the Palais des Sports in Paris, with Sacre and the third version of Bird danced by the 20th Century Ballet; and a year later at the Paris Opera with the ballet of the Parisian house (Patrick Dupond and Charles Jude alternated the role of the mythical bird, while Elizabeth Platel was chosen in Sacre). This “Stravinskian-Bekhartian double program” was one of the first things that Peter Schaufuss bought when he took over the direction of the West Berlin Opera Ballet in 1990 and a lot was done there. Now Malandain challenges fate and resumes the combination, but only choreographing the first work, the second he commissioned to someone who was one of his line dancers.

To fire bird Malandain takes on the ritual part, extrapolates it from the natural environment of the piece, the stylized Russian folklore, and takes it to his terrain, certainly mixed and in a severe design line, spiced with figures from his own phantasmagoria. The reading of rebirth and continuation of the miracle of life, which is already in the original, appears again with symbols and pantomimes. The musical version used, for which no information is given, is doubtful. The mechanics of sound amplification did not help him either.

The surprise in this performance has come from Martin Harriague (Bayonne, 1986), who started late with dance, but who has not wasted any time; He composes his music and calls himself a polymorphous choreographer. I don’t know what that is, but it sounds almost mysterious. This is the first work of Harriague that I have seen, and there is something more intuitive than analytical that makes me think about what I have seen and about his future as a man ruler of bodies and dynamic structures; Is there a choreographer there? Definitely! Perhaps some part of him must still free himself from the trends in vogue and the desire to sensorially exhaust the viewer, but I trust in his sensitive way of orienting himself or of referring to a past that is part of his seminal lymph, and that is why in his version of Sacre There is the old man, the chosen one, the processional circle and the animistic spasm. But he can also strip himself of all that to reach himself and the spectator who awaits him. Massine watched Nijinski’s version a lot before making his own, the first in 1920, and it didn’t cause a breakup. It wasn’t necessary. He delicately forged a continuity and a reworking of the available elements. In a sense, Harriague does the same.

Harriague uses the somewhat hackneyed visual metaphor that, from the upright piano, the musical soul emerges, already converted into a choreutical body. It’s always moving to see that, even if it’s not new. Perhaps Harriague alludes to the fact that Stravinsky composed Sacre in Les Tilleuls, a very modest boarding house in Clarens, a hamlet in Montreux near Lake Leman, and wrote almost the entire score of “in a tiny room, or rather, in a kind of closet three meters by three, whose only piece of furniture “It was an upright piano that I kept muted, a table and a couple of chairs.” At the request of the landlady of the little hotel, Stravinsky’s wife placed some blankets on the piano harp so that it could not be heard, so he composed “the deaf one”, without hearing himself. Stravinsky says: “The idea of The Rite of Spring It occurred to me while I was composing The fire bird. “I had dreamed a scene from a pagan ritual in which a sacrificial virgin danced to death.” It is not risky to say that The Rite of Spring is, despite its theme, the first “European” or “transrussian” by Stravinsky and this is important when choreographing, anecdotes aside, such as how he orchestrated the little train that took him to a nearby town to see the dentist, since this work was done under the pressure of a severe toothache.