Description

“As a ballet about the difficulty of loving, of being the friend of someone who is in love and about the need we often feel to desire and to dream of more or something different from what we are capable of achieving”, is how Martin Schläpfer describes his Third Piano Concerto: a touching dance that reveals the nuances of the human soul in all its many shades, choreographed to Alfred Schnittke’s magnificent Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra: music like “the eye of the needle for the whole, rich world”.

Karole Armitage is regarded as one of the most brilliant figures in American dance. She has worked with George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham and on Broadway, began choreographing at the invitation of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rudolf Nureyev, and created complex connections between dance, the visual arts, poetry and music that were initially associated with the punk movement. In recent years she has probed ever further into philosophical questions of human existence. This is also the case in the Ligeti Essays, which were created in intense interactions with three song cycles by György Ligeti: poetic and nocturnal metaphors for human encounters.

With Dandelion Wine, Paul Taylor created a homage to spring. To a violin concerto by the Baroque virtuoso Pietro Locatelli, this leading artist of modern dance unfurls a joyous round of ever-new connections between the dancers, full of breath-taking leaps and elegant recklessness. “An instant winner, a joyous ode to the springtime of life […], one of his most dazzling works” wrote Anna Kisselgoff in The New York Times.