Stuttgart Ballet: Novitzky/Dawson

Opera House, Stuttgart
July 11, 2024

The final new programme of Stuttgart Ballet’s season saw two choreographers make their Opera House stage debut, although both are well-known and admired.

After four successful pieces for the company in the smaller Schauspielhaus, Artist-in-Residence Roman Novitzky stepped up to the ‘big house’ with his hour-long The Place of Choice. Inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, it’s a deeply thoughtful work that considers the present state of the world, asking where is humanity headed, to Paradise or to Hell? And do we actually have a choice anyway? It’s packed with impressive images and ideas, more of which I suspect would be revealed on second and subsequent viewings.

Danced in socks, The Place of Choice is one of those works that sits on the boundary between contemporary and classical: very much of the former but roots in the latter. Star of the work is the remarkable David Moore, on stage pretty much throughout. In casual grey shirt and trousers, he immediately presents a man lost. A superb opening solo screams of insecurity. Alone, he’s a man full of questions, a man struggling to find answers. He reaches out. To what, to who, is unclear. Is he looking for someone or something? It is very dramatic but also very human.

That sense of unease continues throughout. Novitzky has rapidly established his own choreographic voice. Here, his dance vocabulary is full of movement rooted in the everyday, but also full of sequences, individual moments even, that seem prone to breaking. But more than anything, and expressing in dance the doubts that we all have in this uncertain time, he shows us a man, effectively representing all of us, looking around apparently unable to comprehend what is happening, why it is happening.

Dante’s work takes us from Hell, through Purgatory to Heaven. Novitzky appears to reverse the journey. In the opening scene, the ensemble are in all white, the dance reflected wonderfully in the mirror-like black dance floor. Often, Moore watches the others. But he is more than an observer. He joins in, but in a way that suggests he is somehow being swept along by the tide of the dance, of events; a tide that he cannot stop.

Behind the dance in the opening section is designer Yaron Abulafia’s giant luminous oval, which changes colour: orange, green, purple, white, blue… More than once, the ensemble stop to look at it, as if it has some message or religious significance. Or is it some portent of the future?

Henry Vega’s commissioned score for orchestra and electronics, Falling Fields and Pixel Paths, is not the easiest but, as a soundscape, it does play an important part in creating doubt and insecurity. It has surprising quieter moments too, one such coming when we hear the sound of rain, which seems to wash away the opening scene.

Now Moore finds himself in front of two columns of light. It’s a sort of portal. Either side is a wall of smoke that paints beautiful inky pictures as it drifts. But those walls are only barriers to him. Individuals from the ensemble pass through, sometimes dancing with him, sometimes manipulating him, but in a way that suggests they are only visible to us, before vanishing, ghost-like, back into the mist.

The exception comes in one sublime duet. Moore appears to find hope, comfort, in one of the women. He’s still full of struggle, but she’s lithe and lissome. You feel she represents a moment of hope. She not there, then he finds her, then loses her again.

When the columns of light float away we find ourselves in what looks like a concrete bunker whose walls are discoloured and cracked. The scene is filled with figures wearing black-hooded long coats over black leather-look trousers. The music turns hellish too, becoming full of scrapes, thuds and bangs. Still at the centre of everything Moore is beaten down, although there is also a hint in the occasional brighter moment that hell is not all bad, just as heaven was not all good earlier.

And then a surprise. All the previous costumes come back. There’s a sense of liberation. It becomes light. After all his travails, after all his troubled journey, this, it seems, is the pace he chooses.

I was once asked what made for a ‘good’ dance piece. I replied that it needed to speak to me. Quite how was not important. But it needed to communicate. David Dawson’s new Symphony No.2 “Under the Trees’ Voices”, to Ezio Bosso’s 50-minute, five-movement score of the same title, didn’t just do that. It may be abstract in the sense of being non-narrative and purely about music and movement, but Dawson’s choreography and the company’s dancing reached inside and touched the soul.

Dawson is far from the first ballet choreographer to have used Bosso’s composition. Most well-known of the others is probably Nicholas Blac’s creation for the Joffrey Ballet in 2021 but smaller companies have used sections too including, not that far from Stuttgart and earlier this year, Young Soon Hue for the dance company of the Staatstheater Augsburg. I doubt any are even close to as good as this.

The setting is as sleek as the choreography. Against grey walls, set designer Eno Henze hangs three white ‘sails’ front to back across the stage, with a fourth across the back. The geometry is enhanced to wooden spars with lights inside, the whole moving very slowly throughout the ballet: an ever-changing installation creating an ever-changing scene. In fact, so slowly do they move that it was a while before I realised it was happening.

Costume designer Yumiko Takeshima, a former soloist at the Semperoper in Dresden opting for simple costumes is a touch of genius. Her black leotards for the women and one-piece, sleeved suits for the men serve to emphasise the ballet’s other elements.

Brightly lit by Bert Dalhuysen, Dawson’s choreography for 14 dancers, including a number of principals, has a classical modernity, proving that you can use pointework in contemporary but still aesthetically pleasing ways (other choreographers, and especially young choreographers, please note). The dance flows in perfect harmony with the music. When the men lift the women, and there is a lot of partnering and lifting (indeed, it opens and ends with one woman held overhead), they soar as if riding hot air currents.

It may match Novitzky’s creation in that’s it’s modern in outlook, albeit in a different way, but Dawson’s ballet is far from cutting edge. But then it doesn’t need to be. Classical through and through, it is rather quietly elegant; fifty minutes in which one can escape everything that’s happening in the real world. There may be more to get your teeth into in The Place of Choice in many senses, but Dawson gives us time and space in which to indulge. The audience loved it, roaring their approval at the end. And rightly so.