Between the macrocosmic challenges that are facing the world and the more microcosmic adjustments that accompany any new director (the Wiener Staasoper has welcomed Martin Schläpfer as its new head of ballet), it’s safe to say that the Wiener Staatsballett has met, with strength and beauty, some significant challenges in these past months. Interestingly, considering the very abrupt transition to dance-on-film that most companies are contending with today, Mahler, live chooses to examine the beginnings of this genre. Prior to 1979, there were dance films, perhaps most notably New York City Ballet’s recording of a number of Balanchine’s pieces in West Berlin (1973); but they stood mostly as records of choreography and of an event, not as creations in and of themselves. In Live, choreographer Hans van Manen uses Liszt’s lyricism to give us a balletic film noir for 2020, using the camera as almost a third artist, alongside dancers Marcos Menha and Olga Esina.
At first, I was put off by seeing a few people in the audience masked and distanced; simply because I value escapism in ballet and resented these reminders of today’s painful reality; but this was very brief, and soon Esina took over, dressed in a red tunic and dancing facing upstage, towards her black and white projected film image. I was drawn in further, as it seemed that she working alone, and we were being allowed to watch her watching herself in a mirror. In a strange way, it was a homage to the private work of ballet. Initially, it felt like a derivation of the 2019 Noel Coward production of All About Eve; but the close-ups of Esina’s battered feet in pas de bourrées were gentler, though no less graphic, than Gillian Anderson being repeatedly violently ill over a toilet bowl. Both women, of course, are supreme artists, and can draw the audience in no matter what they are doing.
The best portion of this first work was Esina and Menha moving through the foyers, abandoned cafés, nooks and crannies of the public parts of the Staatsoper. Seeing them sad, lonely, in black and white might be like seeing footage of war torn cities… one day. Right now, it was like watching the ruins of a beloved city bombed, burned and, as yet, without the safety of resolution and reconstruction. The dancers worked together almost without seeing each other, almost as if looking one another in the eye would make this all too real. Painful though these scenes were, they highlighted the intimacy with which the dancers are one with this great institution of Viennese culture. When Esina left the building in a coat and pointe shoes, stepping out into the night of the black and white Ringstraße, there was a sense of kinship, pain and hope felt in the best of this cinematographic tradition. This isn’t the first time Vienna has cried.