The Corps de ballet of the Teatro Massimo brings on stage La grande danza, a triptych of choreographies that includes Sin lo cual no by the Albanian choreographer Gentian Doda, Duende by Nacho Duato and Six Dances, a splendid work signed by Jiři Kylián.
The first of the three choreographies is Sin lo cual no by the Albanian choreographer Gentian Doda, to music by Joaquín Segade, with scenes by Susana Riazuelo and costumes by Jaime Roque de la Cruz, lights edited by Nicolás Fischtel, assistant to the choreography Dimo Kirilov, set-up of the Teatro Massimo. The Corps de ballet of the Teatro Massimo will be engaged in a choral choreography, which sees the dancers go from forced immobility to frenzy, sometimes moving together like the gears of a gigantic machine, sometimes each closed as in its own personal delirium, where every slightest gesture takes on fundamental importance. Joaquín Segade’s music, which also uses industrial noises, accentuates the vision of a humanity dominated by machines.
Instead, it is nature with its mysterious powers at the center of Duende with the choreography of Nacho Duato, on music by Claude Debussy performed by Rosolino Bisconti on the flute, Gaspare D’Amato on the viola and Valentina Rindi on the fringe with the Orchestra of the Teatro Massimo conducted by Alessandro Cadario. Scenes signed by Walter Nobbe, costumes by Susan Unger, lights by Nicolás Fischtel, choreography assistants Eva López Crevillén and Catherine Habasque, in a set-up of the Bratislava Ballet. The term “duende” means in Spanish the elves, magical beings who inhabit nature and animate it with their jokes and somersaults, transporting the public to a fairy world, where the ordinary laws of human life lose their power and meaning.
To the most intellectual and witty resources of humanity, embodied in the century of enlightenment and in the music of Mozart, Six Dances alludes instead to choreography, scenes and costumes by Jiri Kylián, built on the music of the Six German dances of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with lights conceived by Jiří Kylián and made by Joop Caboort, assistant to the choreography Alberto Montesso, in the staging of the Semperoper Ballet in Dresden. With this choreography the great Czech choreographer proposes to the public “six seemingly meaningless moments, unable to develop in front of today’s always troubled world that, for unspecified reasons, everyone carries within himself”, using that “faveable instrument that is our body, so rich that it surpasses all the languages of the world”.
Six Dances is a choreography that is part of the six “black and white” creations by Jiří Kylián created between 1986 and 1991 (also part of Sarabande, Petite Mort and Falling Angels). Tribute to Mozart and his music, these fun six dances bring to the stage the madness, fantasy, wealth and clowning of the composer and his time.