Review of the ballet “Love in Two Chapters” at the Berlin State Opera

The main December premiere of the Berlin State Opera ballet was the evening “2 Chapters Love”, consisting of one-act productions by the Spaniard Sol Leon and the Israeli Sharon Eyal. Tells Tatiana Kuznetsova.

By uniting two famous female choreographers in one program, the Berlin Ballet made a bright conceptual gesture: it combined the tenderly sentimental choreography of a bygone era and the intellectual onslaught of the ballet of today, and perhaps the future. Two former dancers, almost the same age (Sol Leon is five years older, but both are silent about their date of birth), became choreographers with a difference of 15 years; Sol Leon made her debut in 1990, Sharon Eyal – in 2005. It would seem that both are from the same time – the turn of the century, but there seems to be an aesthetic and ideological gap between them.

Both were nurtured by the leaders of the world’s best companies: Sol Leon – Jiri Kylian and his NDT, Sharon Eyal – Ohad Naharin and Batsheva. Their talent was noticed immediately, both became full-time choreographers for their troupes and always worked with co-authors: the Spanish Leon with her choreographer husband Paul Lightfoot, the Israeli Eyal with the music producer and techno-avant-garde ideologist Guy Behar. Now the situation has changed: Sharon Eyal, who has gained worldwide fame, is increasingly choreographing for famous ballet companies, and the company LEV, which she created in 2013, has registered in France. Sol Leon, having experienced the peak of her career at NDT, which she and Paul Lightfoot headed for a long time as a choreographer and artistic consultant after the departure of Jiri Kylian, separated from her co-author husband and found herself a freelancer. The play “Stars Like Moths”, shown at the Staatsoper, is one of her first independent works.

It seems that this ballet is an act of personal psychotherapy. What the choreographer explains in the program is poetic, but confusing. The first part of the composition takes place in the narrow space of the proscenium: avoiding plot details, Sol Leon nevertheless presents very specific characters in close-up. The author’s alter ego (Polina Semionova) is a vulnerable but majestic vamp in stiletto heels, in a black jacket and bare legs; a devoted friend is a lively actor and an unbending optimist who feeds her watermelon; a pathetic loser ballerina in a plucked, smoky tutu with a deliberately irreversible adagio; her handsome gentleman is all in white, looking around for a more impressive lady as he makes his rounds. On the dull black front curtain, the silhouette of a white tree emerges in strokes, some kind of human video life is boiling in the crown…

After this hopeful exposition, the curtain rises, the space swings open to reveal a gray rehearsal room, and there all the tempting premise ends. The usual set of movements for Leon-Lightfoot (“wrapped” alesgons, wide second positions, sliding pirouettes in half-plié) is divided between a dozen bare-legged dancers dressed in black or white shorts and jackets. The vocabulary does not develop or change, despite the contrasting music chosen (from jazz to Bach and from Rameau to Richter). At the dance climax there is a classic jete en tournant, which seems out of place here; in the dramatic one, one of the characters showers Polina, sadly sitting on the floor, with gray dust, probably the ashes of memories. In a word, if, according to Sol Leon, this is that very “life-theater”, then it looks mechanical and dead-end. And the final episode, again brought to the forefront, also does not offer a way out – neither plastic nor directorial.

Sharon Eyal, unlike Sol Leon, does not engage in soul-searching and does not expect understanding: “It is not so important whether the audience understands my idea or not, but it is necessary that they feel the freedom and the essence of the movement.” You can’t help but feel the crazy amplitude and frantic energy of the movements, especially stunning ones performed by the masses. But it can be accepted and interpreted in different ways. In the Berlin premiere of “2 Chapters Love”, designed for 26 performers, Sharon Eyal did not leave a single pas from her sparsely attended “Love Chapter 2”, once shown in Moscow (see “Kommersant” on October 14, 2019): for the past between premieres Six years later, the choreographer’s interests changed.

The pathos of overcoming obsessive-compulsive disorder, which became the motivation and bodily tuning fork of the first production, is a thing of the past. It seems that now the choreographer is preoccupied with more formal problems. In particular, the relationship between modern radical plastic dance and academic classical dance: in “2 Chapters Love,” if there is love, it is between these antagonistic systems: Eyal demonstrates how the artificiality of the classics, taken to the limit, ultimately turns out to be a new avant-garde. And she explores this paradox not with scientific meticulousness, but with charming imagination and a sense of humor.

Classical patterns permeate the entire plastic structure of the ballet, starting with the “swan” arms, exaggeratedly placed behind the back (they were legitimized by Maya Plisetskaya in her “The Dying Swan”), and ending with a series of entrechats with which a certain “Cupid” flutters with a quiver over his shoulders. Ori Lichtik, the author of techno music for all of Sharon Eyal’s performances, here softened his always hard rhythm with the lyrics of bass strings, allowing the choreographer to diversify the range of movements. And now the hands of the soloist (Daniel Muir) weave typical patterns of “oriental” ballet dances, and her back bends, like Scheherazade’s. The corps de ballet, intertwined into one body, minces in the pas de bourre and raises its legs in releve-passe – like a multiplied Kitri. And the frantic Zarema, who jumped out from the crowd, beats herself in despair on the back of the head with countless batmans in an attitude. The organic way in which these classical codes have grown into Sharon Eyal’s signature vocabulary is striking; The prospects on this path are opening up immense. And, given the demand for the prolific Israeli, her romance between the classics and the avant-garde will have many more “Chapters of Love”.