The second world premiere of the season 2023-24 and the last for 2023, the Staatsballett Berlin's double bill 2 Chapters Love is all about female authors — it still needs to be highlighted. The newly appointed artistic director, Christian Spuck, has invited prestigious names such as the choreographers Sol León and Sharon Eyal to develop their ideas on love in the broadest sense. Taking the title from Eyal’s work, the evening is dedicated to love's diverse emotional and mental facets. Leaving the Christmas carols and the Glühwein behind, within the neoclassical Staatsoper Unter den Linden, human nature is explored.
The evening opens with Polina Semionova walking along the balustrade dividing the audience from the orchestra pit. She sits on the elevated stage and puts black stilettos on. With Etta James’ Don’t Cry in the background and eloquent arms and hand gestures, Semionova starts her story. A man emerges from the pit — probably a suitor — and serves her a piece of watermelon before devouring the rest of the slice. By the Spanish choreographer Sol León, Stars Like Moths is an enquiry into the memories she is grateful for. A long-time dancer for NDT under Jiří Kylián, and its artistic director with Paul Lightfoot between 2002 and 2020, León is very experienced in her stagecraft.
The poetic message of her images' strong aesthetic is balanced by vignette-like situations in which the eleven dancers, in monochromatic black or white outfits, are involved. The movement vocabulary has the lines and the fluidity of a contemporary ballet still related to Kylián but with its own flair to which grimaces, coughing and broken speech that we know from Alexander Ekman (or was she first?) have been added. Her reflections take a circular, episodic form: the love of watermelons, of dance, of a man, melting one into the other. Towards the end, the dancers utter fragmented sentences, fragments of life. The music is a collage ranging from James to the Stabat Mater, J.S. Bach, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Ólafur Arnalds, Max Richter, and Jean-Philippe Rameau. Notable images are the deconstructed rehearsal space, with fragments of walls hanging at different heights (León-Lightfoot), Semionova covered in a chalky powder, and the projection of a growing tree, whose falling leaves become the stars of a twirling galaxy: the couples on stage gaze at a twinkly sky as if on a summer picnic. Heartwarming and witty, it kept me somewhere between snivelling and smiling.
Also featuring a lone dancer (Danielle Muir) on stage at the start, 2 Chapters Love, the third co-creation by Eyal and Gai Behar for the Staatsballett, mixes the signature movement language seen in Half Life (2017) with echoes of neoclassical ballet vocabulary and dance works. Part of a series of works on love, it refers to her work Love Chapter 2 (2017) and deals with loneliness and isolation, connection and healing. In a desolated and timeless atmosphere, a dancer slowly explores her body's extreme possibilities: her body as melted wax is unnaturally arched back, positions are held forever and the back attitudes are kicked until exhaustion. She is soon shadowed by two people in the foggy background. With bourrées en demi-pointe, the group, a total of twenty-six, slowly trickles in to a mix of techno beats to which the rubbing sound of a violin has been added (Ori Lichtik).
The group absorbs the three only to leave one behind in ever-changing formations. Their walk, in unison, creates a mesmerising play of legs, an ever-changing labyrinth, in which the eye has nothing and yet plenty of details to linger on. Echoing the classics, in particular Les Ballet Russes, the continuous flicker of the hands and wrists of the dancers clad in one-shoulder white leotards, reminded me of George Balanchine’s Apollo (1928), with quivers referencing ancient Greece gods and goddesses and Scheherazade's (1910) inspired hair ornaments. Still frolicking and lively, the less restricted movements were not as as effective, from my point of view, as Half Life, the first creation for the Staatsballett: no longer images of insects or living organisms but of gods and goddesses, nymphs and satyrs, hopping on stage. The intricacy of the group movement also reminded me of bas reliefs in Indian temples with a light sexual touch towards the end.
Beyond the calibre of the choreographers, it has to be mentioned that the cast’s high-level performance made it a very intense and pleasurable evening to watch. At the risk of sounding banal, considering the international situation: love is a verb. It is not static: it is an action that one takes. The two works did not put love as the answer, but rather as a question: how or what do you love, and why? What is one’s involvement in it? It is an active state, of fostering, protecting and allowing a nurturing space in which healing interdependence can emerge.
