Goyo Montero says goodbye: Staatstheater Nürnberg Ballett in Malditos Benditos

Staatstheater, Nuremberg
July 12, 2025

How to say goodbye? That was question facing Goyo Montero, whose tenure as ballet director at the Staatstheater Nurnberg comes to a close this summer after seventeen very successful years, ahead of his move to the Staatsballett Hannover. The obvious choice was a big gala, or perhaps a programme of excerpts from the many works he’s created in the city. But no, Montero instead opted for something a little different to close the circle.

Montero’s first creation in Nuremberg in 2008 was Benditos Malditos (Blessed Damned). Since then, he created another 24 world premieres, establishing the company firmly among Germany’s best. His final work reverses that opening title. Malditos Benditos is a series of personal encounters with some of the his most popular works. It is a look back but one that is in no way a retrospective. Instead, it’s a revisiting and reinterpretation of sixteen of his own ballets, with two exceptions completely rechoreographing them, sometimes even with different music.

It is a fabulous production, one of superb choreography that stretches across Montero’s entire stylistic spectrum, all the scenes cleverly and very effectively held together by poems by songwriter Joaquín Sabina. As always with Montero, Malditos Benditos is a work of sweeping ensemble moments from which classy solos and duets emerge. Meaning is never far away.

It was danced magnificently too, the ensemble showing all the athleticism, energy, stamina and expression they have become known for. Then there was Montero himself, who also performed in Benditos Malditos all those years ago, and who still dances with grace and precision. And to top it all off and add to the emotion, an appearance by his ten-year-old son, Theo, a fine boy soprano, who sang ‘Im Dorfe’ from Schubert’s Winterreise, standing alongside his father on stage.

Malditos Benditos opens with an ending, the audience seeing the company bowing from behind, a scene from Montero’s 2011 creation Treibhaus (Greenhouse), before a single dancer breaks away and begins a solo.

Most in the audience will surely have had memories jigged by what follows, the dance at different times addressing themes including loneliness, longing, melancholy, love, death. The musical selections are wide-ranging too with classical contributions from John Dowland, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert, song from Bob Dylan and Miguel Poveda, a Federico Garcia Lorca poem, and the modern newly composed electronica of Canadian Owen Belton, a frequent collaborator of Montero’s.

The 300 chairs that make up Leticia Gañán and Curt Allen Wilmer’s set, sometimes piled high at the back, sometimes arranged like a rocky landscape to be climbed over, sometimes simply sat on, are symbolic of all those who have contributed to his works over the past near two decades.

The production is full of powerful images. My favourite moments? Without doubt pretty much everything in the penultimate section, ‘It’s Alright, Ma,’ to the eponymous Dylan song, to which Montero created a solo or short duet for all 22 dancers in the work. A sort of personal parting gift.

Among the most striking elsewhere was that which sees Alisa Uzunova and Elliana Mannella appear magically from beneath a large, shiny gold fabric manipulated by the rest of the company, their duet caught live by a cameraman, the film projected in real time onto a big screen at the back.

Seamlessly out of that comes the return of the wooden life-size figure from Montero’s take on the Nutcracker. Carried and moved by several dancers, and interacting with others, it somehow took on human emotions.

And then that terribly moving final duet when Montero’s young son appears with his father, the couple moving slowly, thoughtfully, across the stage before the dancers emerge and form a tightly knit circle around them.

At the end, the ovation for this, the penultimate performance, was thunderous. I can only imagine what it was like at the final show. As much as Malditos Benditos was a celebration, it was inevitably one tinged with sadness, though. A little sad too that I cannot see any way the production can ever be repeated. Malditos Benditos only works in the context of Montero’s departure, and with him appearing in the work. But sometimes, memories are best left as just that.

So, an era comes to an end. But ends are also beginnings. It will be fascinating to see what Montero does in Hannover, and what incoming Nuremberg director, the choreographer Richard Siegal, will bring to the city’s Staatstheater.