An evening of many colours: Badisches Staatsballett’s International Benefit Gala

Badisches Staatstheater, Karlsruhe
July 13, 2024

At the end of every season, the Badisches Staatsballet brings top dancers to Karlsruhe for a gala. Invariably a wonderful evening’s dance, it’s also a show that raises money for a good cause. This year, that was the Sybel Centre for Child and Youth Services of the Karlsruhe Home Foundation, which supports young people and their families, including in the Augarten School, a special education and counselling centre with a focus on emotional and social development.

But this year’s gala was also a farewell, and a thank you, to outgoing artistic director Bridget Breiner, who is leaving to join the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf as chief choreographer, a post that will enable her to concentrate on creating work without all the other distractions of leading a major company. Breiner may only have led the Staatsballet for five years, but incoming director Raimondo Rebeck has a tough act to follow.

The over-three-and-a-half-hour evening featured sixteen works or extracts of pieces in a range of styles. Intended or not, there appeared to be a linking theme in that most of the works had a narrative base, or implied or reflected on a relationship. Given Breiner has had great success with her story ballets, that seemed very appropriate.

Rita Duclos and Timoteo Mock in Seid umschlingen by Bridget Breiner
Photo Chris Frühe

In November 2019, Bridget Breiner opened her directorship in Karlsruhe with Seid umschlingen (Be embraced). Coming full circle, the gala opened with the section to Minkus’ arrangement of Beethoven’s Symphony No.9 for two pianos. After an emotion-laden opening that sees a woman place her arms around one of the men only for him to melt away, it later bursts into a feast of upbeat classical dance.

Chaconne by Maxime Quiroga to Antonio Tomaso’s Chaconne in G-Minor for Violin and Piano is a sublime, very expressive pas de deux full of lifts, supports and holds, and a very big kiss. It was all wonderfully executed by Balkiya Zhanburchinova and Julian Botnarenko.

Balkiya Zhanburchinova and Julian Botnarenko in Chaconne by Maxime Quiroga
Photo Costin Radu

Body (without) Organs was the first of two contributions by choreographer Richard Siegal and dancers from the Ballet of Difference, associated to the Schauspiel Köln. The title is taken from early 20th-century French writer, dramatist and theatrical theorist, Antonin Artaud, who used the term to evoke the idea of an organ-less body as the ideal of freedom.

Siegal pursues this idea by attempting to free the dancing body from its balletic conventions and automated reactions. But the past and what is ingrained cannot be ignored, so perhaps it’s no surprise that he doesn’t fully succeed. But, danced in a pool of light, the choreography is very appealing, with duets ranging from quirky to sinuous.

Breaking away from tradition in a different way, David Dawson’s Swan Lake, created in 2016 for Scottish Ballet, places the choreographer’s cool but sleek minimalism to the fore. Joined from Glasgow by Bruno Micchiardi, Dressed in Yumiko Takeshima’s exquisitely decorated white leotard, Sophie Martin was a creature of strength, her body sinuous with arms that reached as if wanting to take flight.

Sophie Martin and Bruno Micchiardi in Swan Lake by David Dawson
Photo Andy Ross

Her dance with Micchiardi’s Siegfried (in contrasting grey long-sleeved T-shirt and dark trousers) flowed wonderfully, lifts coming from nowhere and transforming easily into the next moment. But while still poetic, I cannot help feeling that Dawson’s version misses the emotional heft of the best traditional versions, at least out of context as here.

From coolness to panache and fireworks as Nami Ito and Daniel Rittoles wowed in the Flames of Paris pas de deux. Their technical assurance was immense. The height on his leaps and speed on his turns achieved by the virtuoso Rittoles had the audience gasping. Ito showed a wonderful feminine cheekiness in her dancing. Her hops on pointe were super-fast, and I loved the way she changed from fourth position with one arm to fourth position with the other during her excellent fouettés. The roars at the end were deafening.

Maria Baranova and Jinhao Zhang in Le Parc
Photo Chris Frühe

The pas de deux continued with Maria Baranova and Jinhao Zhang of the Bayerisches Staatsballett in that from Angelin Preljocaj’s Le Parc. Danced barefoot to the Adagio from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.23, it was full of grandeur and artistry, but also so human. The couple oozed sensuality and tense harmony. As ever, the highlights were that wonderful moment when she flies, and the kiss.

Zhanburchinova then turned choreographer, her Ainalayn an unusual fusion of traditional Kazakh dance elements, ballet and Vivaldi. The title is a Kazakh word that means something like ‘I take everything bad from you and give you back the best I have.’ A powerful idea, and it was danced with equally powerful intention by Carolina Martins.

Ballet of Difference Köln in Unitxt by Richard Siegal
Photo Thomas Schermer

Finally, before the break, a fun and appealing excerpt from Your Place or Mine by Badisches Staatsballett artist-in-residence Kevin O’Day, to Thomas Siffling’s ‘Blues in the Morning,’ sees seven macho men dance with each other. When the flirty and rather willing Nami Ito arrives, it’s the cue for a series of courtship duets, the other men mostly acting as a sort of upstage backing group on benches at the back.

The second half opened with three gems, starting with the return of Siegal and the dancers from the Ballet of Difference, and a few minutes from the choreographer’s Unitxt.

Originally commissioned by the Bayerisches Staatsballett, it is powered along the insistent beeps and percussive, pulsing rhythms of Alva Noto’s electronic score, from which the work’s title comes. Siegal’s dynamic choreography, reminiscent in many ways of that of William Forsythe, itself matches the accompaniment perfectly. The charged dancers were full of speed and accuracy.

A change of mood brought the well-known final pas de deux from Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain. João Miranda and Sara Zinna imbued it with great feeling although I’m not sure that anything will ever match that film of it at the Fire Island Dance Festival with the sea as a backdrop.

The performance of the evening was Bruna Andrade of Stuttgart-based Gauthier Dance in Marco Goecke’s Infant Spirit, however. The choreographer, who is to take over as ballet director at Ballett Basel in autumn 2025, is known for his unique vocabulary of fast, flickering, trembling movement, hands in particular. But what really makes his dance is the contrast between that and the freer, smoother moments; the pauses, the breaths. And then there’s the feeling that sits behind it. Here that came in spades.

To two songs from the group Antony and the Johnsons, ‘Rapture’ and ‘The Lake,’ the work tells of Goecke’s growing up in Wuppertal. In a grey suit, Andrade painted a portrait of a sensitive figure, someone torn, full of uncertainty, searching and dreams. Displaying all the sharpness and tautness that Goecke’s choreography demands, she was quite simply terrific and worth every second of the rapturous and prolonged applause she got.

Bruna Andrade in Infant Spirit by Marco Goecke
Photo Chris Frühe

Mozart was one of Uwe Scholz’s favourite composers, and while his choreography always partners the chosen music, with Mozart it seems extra close. Scholz’s Jeunehomme, to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.9 (itself known as ‘Jeunnehomme’), first made in 1986 but subsequently revised is an elegiac pas de deux to the second movement Andantino. Intensely musical, it’s typical of his dance. At times, Bridgett Zehr and Olgert Collaku said so much yet moved barely perceptibly. At times, the dance is quite pensive but when Zehr was lifted, and there are a lot of lifts, it felt like she was being encouraged to fly.

The evening’s world premiere came in the shape of Glimmer by O’Day. A contemporary duet performed by Alba Nadal and Joshua Swain to music by Bryce Dessner, it’s a pleasant, easy going number, that also comes with some athletic partnering and a bit of a twinkle in the eye.

As the evening approached its end, there were plenty of classical fireworks from Lucas Erni and Lucia Solari in the Grand pas de deux from Don Quixote. Both pulled out all the stops from the off, their leaps, pirouettes and fouettés all right on the button.

The final duet fell to the still boyish Friedemann Vogel (Stuttgart Ballet) and Polina Semionova (Staatsballett Berlin), however, who then treated us to passion of a different sort in the Bedroom pas de deux from Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon. Their dance was tender and full of lightness.

Julian Botnarenko and Sara Zinna
in The Waltz of the Flowers from Das Mädchen & der Nussknacker
Photo Chris Frühe

It seemed right that the gala should close with a last dance from Breiner. It may be the height of summer, but the Waltz of the Flowers from her Das Mädchen & der Nussknacker (The Girl and the Nutcracker) hit the mark perfectly in a lively, colourful, finale to along, but very satisfying evening.