Richard Siegal‘s diverse troupe merges ballet, contemporary dance, and pop culture in “UNITXT,” his radical reinterpretation of classical techniques and concepts of symmetry set to the beats of electronic avant-gardist Alva Noto.
Unitxt, which premiered on June 25,2013 at Munich’s Prinzregenten Theater, sends 12 dancers on a 25-minute “tour de force”.
The commission by the Bavarian State Ballet was the occasion for Richard Siegal to propose a collaboration with celebrity industrial designer, Konstantin Grcic. Elaborating on the functionality of the pointe shoe, the team of Siegal and Grcic imagined together other possible material interfaces with the dancer’s body that could enhance human movement potential.
Along with the resulting “wearable objects”, Unitxt is motored by the visceral bass-heavy pulse of Alva Noto’s electronic music to present a vision of ultra-dynamic ballet.
Dancer and choreographer Richard Siegal is looking for a fresh new appeal for contemporary dance by working with artists of all genres. In 2005, he founded ‘The Bakery’ with home bases in Berlin and Paris as a platform for collaborative projects including dancers, musicians, architects and software engineers.
Siegal founded the Ballet of Difference in 2016 with dramaturge Tobias Staab and touring manager Claudia Bauer of Ecotopia Productions. The company interrogates ballet and the position it holds as a cultural artifact in the 21st century and demonstrates its continued relevance as a contemporary art form. The company takes the question of difference as a departure point and explores this in collaboration with a diverse group of artists from different cultural and aesthetic backgrounds.
An important element of Siegal’s work is the development of his ‘If-then’ method which references logical equations from science and technology to create choreographic material.
Siegal has previously presented his innovative works during festivals around the world and has been awarded several honours, including the New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award, the S.A.C.D. Prize and the German Theatre prize Der Faust.
Siegal staged The New 45 with Junior Company / Bavarian State Ballet II. In the season 2012/2013, he created Untixt for the main company. It premiered in June 2013, together with Cunningham’s BIPED. in April 2015, Portrait Richard Siegal, with Unitxt, In A Landscape and Metric Dozen opened the Ballet Festival Week, in August of the same year, his creation Model was premièred at Ruhrtiennale.