Bayerisches Junior Ballett München celebrates 15 years

Prinzregententheater, Munich
June 12, 2025

This season the Bayerisches Junior Ballett München (BJBM) celebrated its fifteenth anniversary with an array of performances. Amongst the highlights were a premiere, Return to Innocence, by 19-year-old company member Simon Adamson-De Luca, who shows a promising talent, and a gala evening with alumni, now scattered in companies all over Europe. Before they performed, they each told their story and what the BJBM meant to them in a video recording. The festivities culminated on June 11 with something new, Devil’s Kitchen,a world premiere by Marco Goecke and something old, Oscar Schlemmer’s iconic Das Triadische Ballett from 1922.

Devil’s Kitchen is the first piece Goecke has choreographed since the scandal in Hannover eighteen months ago, when he smeared dog poop in the face of a critic and was instantly released from his directorship of the ballet. He has spent the time since being ‘paralysed,’ and lamenting the death of his dog Gustav, whom he was very close to, he explained in an interview.

The new piece for fifteen dancers is typical Goecke. A black stage with a foggy background and dancers dressed in black baggy pants, two with naked torsos, the rest with short tank tops. Costumes are by Susanne Stehle. With high speed they appear and disappear in solos, duets, trios and groups with Goecke’s fluttering hands, angular arm movements, almost no leg movements and rigid bodies. But almost imperceptibly a new softness has crept into the movements, here a rounded ballet port de bras, there a jazzy hip, floating arms.

To songs by Pink Floyd, a lonely man silently screams his anguish. Encounters are brief, but individuals are no longer encapsulated in their own loneliness and inner pain making them look like isolated atoms bouncing into and off each other like in earlier Goecke pieces. They embrace and linger a moment. A couple even kiss several times, moving like mechanical dolls. It seems as if relationships have become possible. Maybe this new softness foretells what we can expect, when Goecke takes over the directorship of the Ballett Basel at the beginning of next season.

All the dancers were marvellous. This is one of Goecke’s special talents. No matter which company he works with, he always makes the dancers look fabulous.

Das Triadische Ballett (The Traiadic Ballet) is perhaps the only ballet in the history of dance that has achieved world fame even though nobody really knows what it looked like. The Bauhaus artist Oscar Schlemmer (1888-1943), who had no formal dance training, created the ballet with two dancers, Elsa Hötzel and Albert Burger, who were soon erased from its history. His idea for the ballet was Der Mensch (the human being) not in the emotional sense, but as pure form and, inspired by the industrialization, as a machine. In the ballet he tried to create a human prototype consisting of circles, triangles and squares.

At the premiere in 1922 it received lukewarm reviews. There were occasional revivals over the next ten years, all with substantial alterations, but it was soon forgotten. While detailed drawings of all the costumes survive, half of the originals themselves were destroyed in a fire in 1944. They defined the dancers’ movements and lent themselves names like Spiral, Goldball, Diver, Diskdancer, Wirefigure to mention a few. Most are heavy and made of wood.

Then in 1977, German choreographer Gerhard Bohner reconstructed the ballet based on Schlemmer’s intensions using basic ballet steps, commissioning a new soundscape by Hans-Joachim Hespos. He worked with Ivan Liska, former Director of the Bayerisches Staatsballett, now director of the BJBM and the late Colleen Scott. It became a huge success and toured all over the world with 85 performances between 1977 and 1989, when the costumes went into storage.

In 2014, Ivan Liska and Colleen Scott revived the ballet for the BJBM and it has been in the repertoire since. But this was the last performance. The costumes will go back to the Archiv der Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

The dancers could have done with a little more rehearsal time. Often their lines were blurred, which takes away the clearness of expression. But in solos, duet and pas de trois, they took us through the prototypes of human relationships. A woman, dressed like a spinning top is interested in a man, the Diver, who is not interested in her. A woman in a spiral skirt is guarded by two men turned into shields, and Harlequin is like a jumping jack. You can actually hear the clattering of the wood, when somebody pulls his invisible string. Some passages are excruciatingly long like the pas de deux between the Layered Skirt, a tutu opening up like an accordion at the back and the Pillow Dancer, a man looking as if all his muscles were exposed. Nevertheless, it was a joy to see these toy-like and futuristic looking costumes perform one last time.

But the ballet is not sunk into total oblivion, the surviving nine of Schlemmer’s original costumes from 1922 are on display in the permanent exhibition at Staatsgallerie Stuttgart.

For more on Das Triadische Ballett and its history, read David Mead’s feature from 2022 that marked the ballet’s centenary.