Two assumptions about the origins of this programme, Beethoven and the Dutch School, spring to mind. The first is that this triple bill of work by Dutch choreographers was a labour of love for Polish National Ballet’s artistic director, Krzysztof Pastor, paying tribute to his decade-long dance career at Dutch National Ballet, performing works by Hans van Manen, Toer van Schayk and Ted Brandsen (amongst others). The second is to speculate that, given Pastor has been running things in Warsaw since 2009, it has taken a while for his dream bill of Dutch masters to come to fruition.
George Balanchine is alleged to have said to van Manen that Beethoven’s music was impossible to choreograph to and so Pastor added another specialist dimension to his programme by proving that Beethoven’s music can be tamed by the best choreographers, especially if they’re Dutch. Two of these three works are proven masterpieces, van Manen’s Grosse Fuge (made in 1971 for Nederlands Dans Theater) and van Schayk’s Seventh Symphony (1986, for Dutch National Ballet). Sandwiched between this venerable pair came Brandsen’s Eroica Variations, which had enjoyed its world premiere (with this same cast) just a few days prior to this performance.
Three non-narrative ballets to the music of Beethoven may have been a risk but all credit to this full audience in Warsaw where an appreciation of the mix of pure dance and extraordinary music was palpable: the elderly gentleman seated to my right was so absorbed in the performance that he grunted appreciation almost by the bar, that is when he wasn’t humming along to the more popular tunes. His was quite a performance in its own right but not the one I was expecting to experience!
Still regularly revived around the world 50+ years after its creation, Grosse Fuge is understandably regarded as van Manen’s masterpiece. Highly regarded as it is, I find the choreographic structure to be now somewhat dated. The curtain rose on four women standing tightly in a group upstage left while four men performed a kind of courtship dance for their benefit with a white light stretched across the backdrop like a barre. After a face-off between the sexes, they paired off into four heteronormative couples, performing as a group and in their individual duets: the women wore white leotards and tights; the men, bare-chested, dressed in ankle-length dark skirts and belts, the latter remaining in place when the skirts were dropped to the floor and roughly flung against the backdrop where they remained, haphazardly placed, for the rest of the piece. Choreographically, there is a significant amount of spinning, jumping, upraised arms and high kicking punctuated by trademark moments of van Manen wit. In one of the most memorable motifs the women pulled themselves from the floor by grabbing their partner’s belts in the groin area.
Brandsen’s Eroica Variations was particularly memorable for the remarkable solo pianism of Piotr Sałajczyk. One could quite easily have forgotten the dance and listened to the concert (or, indeed, hummed the familiar theme, as did my neighbour). Brandsen cleverly chose music that contrasted with the works on either side, opting for a more playful and joyous choreography for ten dancers, arranged in various permutations (solos, duets, trios and ensemble sections). I was not a fan of the multi-coloured individual costumes, although acknowledging that they stamped a more contemporary mark on the programme. Normally, I have a pet hate for choreographic sequences where dancers run from one wing to the other, a device used by Brandsen, but here it suggested a poignancy (not unlike a similar effect in Wayne McGregor’s Infra) where one of the dancers falls, to be ignored by the travelling masses around her. The best praise for Brandsen’s new work is that it held its own against those more familiar Dutch masterpieces.
And that is exactly what van Schayk’s Seventh Symphony is. If Beethoven’s work is a challenge to choreographers, then this must be especially so for his heavy symphonic compositions and yet van Schayk has seemingly added to the splendour of the Seventh Symphony with layers of movement that give visual spectacle to the vitality and radiance of the music. It’s an ensemble piece for twenty dancers and each of them adds to the power and intensity of a beautiful work that deserves to be regarded as a classic in the Dutch repertoire.
The palpable credit to Pastor’s company is how superbly the dancers rose to meet the myriad challenges of these three works. It looks like a company in very fine form even at the end of a demanding season.
