Dancers of Tomorrow: Heinz-Bosl-Stiftung Matinée in Munich

Bayerisches Staatsoper, Munich
November 9, 2025

All the hours a dancer spends taking classes or rehearsing in a studio is just a prerequisite for the day when he or she goes on stage. This is the place where a dancer artistically matures, but it is also the place where she or he finds out, whether they will make it. Or not. Four times a year, the students of the Ballett-Akademie der Hochschule für Musik und Theater München (Akademie) and the Bayerisches Junior Ballett München (BJBM) come together to dance in a joint performance at the 2101-seat opera house.

The performances are like a get together of family and friends, but not only those of the students. The two institutions have a huge group of loyal followers and the house is always full. In between the ballets Jan Broeckx, director of the Akademie, and Ivan Liska, director of the BJBM, informally, and often with a lot of humour, talk the audience through the program.

This year the Akademie students from the two bachelor classes are very strong. They all looked good in Frederick Ashton’s Les Patineurs, from 1937 to music by Giacomo Meyerbeer, which opened the matinée.

Four couples glide into an ice-blue winter set without any props. Other skaters enter and leave. Two women, Sofijja Radovanovic and Olesia Chyzh, clad in dark blue tops move more stiffly, only for Chyzh to then break into a ferocious series of fouettés at the end. Two women in red, a couple in white and a solo man, superbly danced by Toranosuke Yamagucchi, mix into the action full of funny moments and the occasional falls. With their fur-trimmed jackets and jolly amiability, it brings associations to an enjoyable afternoon at a skating rink in a bygone era, all ending in a flurry of snowflakes.

The second ‘act’ opened with Hans van Manen’s Unisono (1978) to music by Joseph Haydn and Johann Sebastian Bach. It was overwhelming to see 57 students of all ages from the Akademie filling the 2500 square meter stage. They formed lines, different formations, wove in and out of each other as they created incredibly beautiful structures.

The BJBM has a cohort of 16 dancers of which, this season, 13 are new, chosen from 620 applicants. Nevertheless, they appeared like a homogeneous group, technically good in the three modern pieces they presented.

Joe Bratko-Dickson and Mark Sims were hilarious and excelled in Ralf Jaroschinsky’s 1998 Intuition Blast to excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s score to Swan Lake. In pants, shirts and flying ties, they presented a modern swan version that later mutated into hip-hop, making you experience the well-known music in a completely new way.

Before the BJBM appeared in Richard Siegal’s The New 45, (2008), which refers to the jazz singles by Oscar Peterson, Clark Terry, Benny Goodman and Harry Belafonte he uses as music, Liska gave a little speech, during which he showed a single vinyl record. He asked how many of the ten-year-olds in the audience knew what it was. An unanswered, but nevertheless, very interesting question that made the audience laugh. Elze Sadauskaite, Benedetto Fenni, Apolline Hartz and Guillermo Ganzález Maroto mastered the quirky, jazzy movements excellently.

For many of the dancers joining the two-year-program at BJBM, it is like getting a new family, one you are always happy to return to. The New 45 was staged by Nicha Rodboon, one of the company’s first students, joining in 2011, just a year after its founding, and who subsequently danced with the Bayerisches Staatsballett and the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen. Rodboon performed at BJBM’s company premiere of the ballet in 2012. Remounting it, she says in an interview, was like returning to an old conversation and suddenly understanding all the subtleties, which you earlier on did not hear.

The evening concluded with the Finnish choreographer Jorma Elo’s Slice to Sharp, which he created for New York City Ballet in 2006 to a mix of music by Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber and Antonio Vivaldi. Against a blue background four couples weave around with movements reminiscent of Balanchine and with the speed so characteristic of NYCB. It will be interesting to see how the 16 BJBM dancers fare in the classical repertoire, which will hopefully be on the program in March.

The Akademie is not only a school for dancers but also for musicians. The 32 member Volta Ensemble, all students, played live for Ashton’s Les Patineurs, conducted by Mark Pogolski, their musical director and teacher. For the ensemble, the matinées are also a way of getting concert practice.

The popularity of these matinées is huge. The performers were applauded as long and as loud as the Bayerisches Staatsballet a few nights earlier at the season’s opening performance of John Neumeier’s Nutcracker.