Badisches Staatsballett: Leuchtfeuer

Staatstheater, Karlsruhe
June 28, 2025

As is so often the case when a new director takes over, the big question at the Badisches Staatsballett following Raimondo Rebeck’s succeeding of the very successful Bridget Breiner was, in what direction will he take the company.

While the Leuchtfeuer (which translates as ‘beacon’) triple-bill that premiered last autumn doesn’t give a definitive answer to that question, it maybe offers some clues. It is certainly a very mixed programme. Rebeck’s own A Journey of a Memory, originally created for Astana Ballet, is an appealing, pleasant neoclassical translation of memory and past emotional encounters. More interesting is Das Schloss is Staatsballett house choreographer and deputy ballet director Kristina Paulin’s take on Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel of the same title, however. So unfinished, that it actually ends mid-sentence. And Mauro Bigonzetti’s Cantata is a riotous look at Southern Italian village life and people. One work on pointe, one in flat shoes, one in bare feet. All, it should be said up front, fabulously danced.

Paulin is known for combining elements of classical and contemporary movement, and for telling stories through her work. That’s all very clear in Das Schloss, created to mark the 100th anniversary of the author’s death, and a surreal representation of his haunting exploration of bureaucracy and the futile pursuit of an unobtainable goal. It’s a ballet with a lot to like. Despite the episodic and difficult nature of the text, Paulin holds the narrative together skilfully, telling the tale with admirable clarity.

Das Schloss opens with a man trying to find a way into a castle that sits atop a steep crag. It’s cold and snowing. The scene immediately brings associations with Mary Shelley’s Dracula, the ballet version of which by Kenneth Tindall (in the audience on this evening), the Staatsballett will be performing next season.

Unlike Jonathan Harker, the man in Das Schloss, known simply as ‘K.’, never does get to the castle. Not that it matters, because the ballet, like the book, isn’t really about the castle at all, it’s about deadlock. Indeed, the title has a double meaning, ‘schloss’ in German meaning both castle and lock.

Apart from the opening outline of the castle, Yoko Seyama’s minimalist set is full of abstract, straight lines and light tubes. Supplemented by props from the 1920s, when the novel was written, it most effective at suggesting place and time, however.

Against this, Daniel Rittoles, in brown trousers and light overcoat, gave a stellar performance as K., a man clearly increasingly struggling to come to terms with his inability to access the castle and continuing to be seen as an unwanted outsider.

When all fails, K. makes love Frieda (Lucia Solari), a barmaid and former mistress of Klamm (Lasse Caballero), a castle superior, who wanders through scenes; sort of there but not there, and totally inaccessible. With K. topless and Freida in an airy white dress, their pas de deux is beautifully sinuous, but it’s not particularly passionate and certainly not romantic. Then again, he’s not really in love with her, just using her as a means to access the castle. When she finds out, it’s no surprise that she rejects him.

Paulin also designed the costumes, which again bring together modern and period. Most intriguing are those for the corps, who arrive in black frocks and caps. They are an apparition from centuries before, their dress, not unlike those of peasants in many Dutch Renaissance paintings, a symbol that time stands still in this cold, wintry place.

It’s not all darkness, though. The ballet is lightly sprinkled with moments of humour including the arrival of Klamm’s two assistants, Arthur and Jeremiah (Niccolò Masini and Filippo Valmorbida), the rider and deliverer of messages, Hans (Geivison Moreira) and K. getting stuck on hold while calling the castle by telephone.

Davidson Jaconello’s music initially evokes the strangeness of the place perfectly, and is supplemented effectively with noises and spoken text from the novel. In the second half, when the focus switches to the state of K’s mind, it switches to a more abstract soundscape of assorted noises.

Kafka’s literary executor observed that the author intended that K. should die, exhausted by his futile efforts to gain acceptance from the locals but that, on his deathbed, he should finally to receive a permit to stay in the village. Paulin’s ballet ends with Rittoles as K. walking slowly towards us as the curtain falls, precisely as if his life is closing.

To a collage of music by Ólafur Arnalds, Ezio Bosso, Frédéric Chopin, Philip Glass and Fazil Say, Rebeck’s A Journey of a Memory is a ballet of joy and sadness, of powerful emotions and gentle touches, of longing for a past which has gone, and maybe never quite existed as imagined.

The ballet takes place in a dimly lit hall, an empty oversized picture frame at the back, a couple of chandeliers having fallen to the floor, clinging to the largest of which is the elegant and expressive Dina Levin, described simply as ‘The Woman’. Having awakened, she is joined by Natsuka Abe as her second self, who enters through the mirror. The pair dance an appealing duet before being joined by two men, Lasse Caballero and Ledian Soto, again it seems, two images of the same person.

The Woman’s memories are soft and tender. The many duets flow beautifully, all full of longing. Classical and on pointe, but with a gently modern touch, the dance is softly romantic. This is not a time or place for extravagance or big virtuoso steps. The two men carry their partners with ease, making them seemingly float through the space. The foursome is backed by a chorus of six backing couples, although they do sometimes feel too much, taking attention away from the main pairings.

Leuchtfeuer closes with Cantata by Mauro Bigonzetti, a look at life in an unidentified southern Italian village, particularly the relationship between its men and women. Danced to a soundtrack of updated folk songs that are both bitter and sweet, it’s earthy, at times full of sadness and misery, before culminating in joy.

All very much choreographed along gender lines, the folk dance-influenced choreography for the ensemble is interspersed by solos, duets and one spoken scene, all performed with the rest of the cast watching on. Mio Sumiyama was particularly memorable for a solo full of deep emotion and feeling. The classic but updated folk songs that form the soundtrack are both bitter and sweet, and do reflect the physical, grounded dance closely.

It may be how things are in Southern Italy, but the men of the ballet do feel able to treat the women as they wish. On several occasions they are seen spreadeagled. They are held aloft, legs and arms stretched wide and very open. After one ensemble dance, they are quite literally tossed away, discarded as one might a sweet wrapper. The women do later fight back, but there’s something about their willingness to be objectified as sexual objects, and to be treated in the way they are, that is unsettling.

I also didn’t care for the spoken discussion between two women about who was causing a bad small. The humour is childish and it interrupts the dance for far too long.

Cantata does eventually all turn into fun, though, everyone coming together in a riotous, hugely energetic ensemble dance that it’s impossible not to like.