Fifty-Fifty

“Maillot/León & Lightfoot”
Ballet of the State Theater Nuremberg
State Theater
Nuremberg, Germany
May 04, 2024

by Ilona Landgraf
Copyright © 2024 by Ilona Landgraf

The Ballet of the State Theater Nuremberg’s new double bill combines Jean-Christophe Maillot’s Les Noces (2022 version) with Stop-Motion (2014) by Sol León and Paul Lightfoot. Both pieces have now entered the repertory of a German company for the first time.

For Maillot, the artistic director of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, Monaco’s dance history matters. In 1911, Diaghilev’s legendary Ballets Russes performed there for the first time; in the winter of 1923, the company permanently set up shop at the Grand Théâtre at the Monte-Carlo Casino. Earlier in the same year, Bronislava Nijinska rehearsed her Les Noces at the Casino or, more specifically, on the building’s rooftop. The premiere of Les Noces at the Théâtre de la Gâíte in Paris in June 1923 was a success as much because of Nijinska’s progressive choreography as Stravinsky’s music.

Maillot’s modern version is based on Nijinska’s original but swaps the gravity of a Russian peasant wedding for a breezy Riviera flair. White, black, and gray colors replaced Natalia Goncharova’s earthy designs. The young couple-to-be wore white pantsuits, their parents were clad in gray, and the bridesmaids and groomsmen changed from black pantsuits into white ones (costumes by Jean-Michel Lainé).
Huge, white, semitransparent partitions with wavy edges served as a backdrop behind which the newlyweds retreated. The partitions later formed the confines of the wedding site and, when pushed closer together, the bed chamber. A long, narrow seesaw acted as a table, catwalk, slide, and podium for some casual dancing. It also served as a bench upon which the romance of the bride (Lisa Van Cauwenbergh) and the groom (Luca Branca) burgeoned, but the groomsmen tilted the seesaw such that both slid off to either side.
Two pas de trois that were danced mirror-symmetrically or point-symmetrically recalled the strict, geometrical patterns of Nijinska’s choreography. Other allusions included clasped hands, cup-shaped hands held next to the chin, and closed-leg jumps. Apart from that, Maillot’s choreography was space-consuming and picked up speed during the ceremony. The dancers slid on their bellies across the floor and switched from deep pliés to swirling turns, their arms reaching out wide. It took some time and insistence for the groom, at first shy and eager to run off, to hesitantly take his place next to the bride. After some back and forth though, the two took to one another so intensely that they needed to be separated. As the bells of Stravinsky’s music rang, the bride, her feet supported by the groom, wriggled herself upward on the tilted seesaw as if climbing toward a climax. The closing partitions shielded the couple’s intimacy.
Sadly, the State Theater’s sound system was inadequate to do the music justice.

Except for Kunstkamer, a witty co-choreography by León, Lightfoot, Crystal Pite, and Marco Goecke, I found León and Lightfoot’s pieces drab and cheerless. Stop-Motion is no exception. In an interview, Lightfoot compared it with a “cathedral for the art” and called it their signature piece. I’m sorry to say, but the art of dance certainly isn’t manifest in Stop-Motion. As much as León and Lightfoot explained the political background of the piece—the atmosphere of vulnerability that accompanied its creation, how their daughter’s coming of age influenced the production, and the extent to which it depicts the self-emancipation of women—hardly any of it is conveyed on stage. Unlike in Pina Bausch’s dance theater, most of the scenes that León and Lightfoot invented lack substance and meaning, and it doesn’t help that León brands the choreography as a poem.

There was nothing poetic in the way that the five men and three women froze in Arabesque, ran on the spot, and turned hop-by-hop while holding their upstretched legs with one hand. One man carried a woman across the stage, her legs split; another clasped his hands in desperation. His solemn solo seemed to reflect some unsuccessful soul-searching. A group skipped forward in plié, their feet pounding the floor. Groups often stood motionless, sometimes facing away from the audience. Max Richter’s music implied drama, but on stage, nothing special happened. At one point, a woman in a black dress lay prone, its train (León’s “symbol of femininity”) draped across the floor. León’s and Lightfoot’s daughter, Saura, glanced toward the audience from a black-and-white, slow-motion video screen that hung from above. Later, she morphed into a bird that flew away. Half into Stop-Motion, five men dropped white powder on stage, the dust of which swirled up with every move and gave the eyes something to look at. Stop-Motion ended with the lighting fixtures lowered from the fly loft and the black backdrop and side wings dropped, revealing the bare backstage machinery.

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