Monthly Archive: November 2024

Exhausting

“Dragons”
Eun-Me Ahn Company
Forum Ludwigsburg
Ludwigsburg, Germany
November 09, 2024

by Ilona Landgraf
Copyright © 2024 by Ilona Landgraf

1. Ensemble, “Dragons” by E.-M.Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024 © S.YunTwo years ago, the South Korean choreographer Eun-Me Ahn’s company toured the Forum Ludwigsburg with North Korea Dance. Last weekend, it presented the 2021 piece, Dragons. Ahn handpicked five dancers from Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Malaysia to participate in the production who couldn’t join rehearsals due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. Instead, their dance parts were captured on video and then animated into 3-D digital avatars of superhuman size and abilities. They shared the stage with the seventy-year-old (and usually shaved bald) Ahn and her company. Because the five dancers from abroad were all born in 2000, which, according to the Chinese zodiac, was the Year of the Dragon, Ahn called the piece Dragons. The current year also marks the Year of the Dragon (the Chinese zodiac is a repeating twelve-year cycle), which may be the reason for touring Dragons in Europe and the UK right now.

3. Ensemble, “Dragons” by E.-M.Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024 © S.Yun2. Ensemble, “Dragons” by E.-M.Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024 © S.YunContrary to my expectations, no figure in the piece even remotely resembled a dragon. Instead, Ahn used silver tubes for the set and costume design and as props to signify the long, slender bodies of dragons. Curtains of such tubes represented the backdrop and hung on either side of the stage. The first to step through the curtain was a woman in a surreal outfit. She sported a fancy red headdress decorated with colored ribbons, a necklace of golf ball-sized pearls, and a black and silver dress. Her right arm was stuck in a long silver tube, which she moved like a sock puppet. It seemed to be the source of her monologue (in a language unfamiliar to me), which was interrupted by occasional screams. It called a man on stage who happily hopped to the tune of the tube. His silver skirt, mismatched socks, and multicolored knit cap were as strange as the attire of the next lady.
4. Ensemble, “Dragons” by E.-M.Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024 © S.Yun5. Ensemble, “Dragons” by E.-M.Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024 © S.YunHer headdress was reminiscent of a pink ship’s canvas mounted on top of the Eiffel Tower, and her green skirt hid another person whose gloved hands occasionally stuck out. The bulky silver tube around the lady’s neck seemed to substitute for a feather boa. Schlager music accompanied her sedate stroll across the stage. She was followed by two dancers whose hands were inserted in silver tubes like muffs. Their arm movement was restricted, so they merely stepped from one foot to the other, each foot carefully rolling from heel to toe. Later, bigger tubes were disassembled like huge springs made of metal strips 6. Ensemble, “Dragons” by E.-M.Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024 © S.Yunand, in the form of colorful 3-D animations, floated across the stage area like sedate sea serpents. At one point, the dancers portrayed walking tube worms with their upper bodies swaying forward and back. A picture of a human face on an illuminated porthole-like screen represented the front.

Young-Gyu Jang’s compilation of music included calm guitar and piano melodies and meditative passages of almost sleep-inducing length, but bouts of merciless electronic noise (and a join-in tapping session) ensured that everyone stayed awake.
Thumping techno beats interspersed with Amerindian-like shouts heralded four dancers, for example, who swirled across the stage and occasionally flung themselves onto the floor, showcasing the shiny fabric of their wide, floor-length skirts. Other eye-catchers included a silver juggling plate that was thrown from one dancer to the other, man-sized, 3-D, video soap bubbles that they rolled around and then shattered, and a (likewise video-animated) waterfall in the shape of an arch.
7. Eun-Me Ahn, “Dragons” by E.-M.Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024 © S.Yun8. Ensemble, “Dragons” by E.-M.Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024 © S.YunStars, comets, and glowing swoosh symbols (the sort that is commonly used in comics) flew around the dancers when they introduced the absent foreign guests. Short biographies of the guests were projected on the backdrop, read by voice-over, and lip-synced by their proxies on stage.
For the curtain call, the company changed into golden mini dresses and clunky golden boots. In this context, the red rose that the Forum Ludwigsburg traditionally presents to each artist looked like a foreign object.

10. Ensemble, “Dragons” by E.-M.Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024 © S.Yun9. Ensemble, “Dragons” by E.-M.Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024 © S.YunAccording to the booklet, Ahn mingles the “nonchalance of street dance” with elements of Indochinese kathak, Japanese kabuki, and Thai Khon mask dance and connects millennia-old tradition with the digital age. On stage, any remnant of tradition was drowned in a garish artificial world. The extensive use of 3-D videos sometimes overshadowed the real dancers.

Eun-Me Ahn’s company is advertised as a “bearer of lightness, joy, and optimism” that represents the energy and freshness of Asia’s Zoomers. I’m unfamiliar with Asian culture and the Zoomers’ values and therefore cannot assess to what extent Ahn captured their spirits. To me, Dragons felt like an overdose of blatant superficiality that sapped my energy and left me with a feeling of emptiness.
11. Ensemble, “Dragons” by E.-M.Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024 © S.Yun

Links: Website of the Eun-Me Ahn Company / Gadja Productions
Website of the Forum Ludwigsburg
Trailer “Dragons”
Photos: 1. Ensemble, “Dragons” by Eun-Me Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024
2. Ensemble, “Dragons” by Eun-Me Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024
3. Ensemble, “Dragons” by Eun-Me Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024
4. Ensemble, “Dragons” by Eun-Me Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024
5. Ensemble, “Dragons” by Eun-Me Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024
6. Ensemble, “Dragons” by Eun-Me Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024
7. Eun-Me Ahn, “Dragons” by Eun-Me Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024
8. Ensemble, “Dragons” by Eun-Me Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024
9. Ensemble, “Dragons” by Eun-Me Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024
10. Ensemble, “Dragons” by Eun-Me Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024
11. Ensemble, “Dragons” by Eun-Me Ahn, Eun-Me Ahn Company 2024
all photos © Sukmu Yun
Editing: Kayla Kauffman

Unstoppable

“Spartacus”
Ballet of the Krasnoyarsk State Opera and Ballet Theatre
Hvorostovsky Krasnoyarsk State Opera and Ballet Theatre
Krasnoyarsk, Russia
October 18, 2024 (video)

by Ilona Landgraf
Copyright © 2024 by Ilona Landgraf

Photos: 1. Y.Kudryavtsev (Crassus) and ensemble, “Spartacus” by Y.Grigorovich, Krasnoyarsk State Opera and Ballet Theatre 2024, photo by E.Koryukin © Krasnoyarsk State Opera and Ballet TheatreThis October, the Krasnoyarsk Ballet revived Yuri Grigorovich’s epic Spartacus, which had been absent from their stage for seventeen years. The production was therefore announced as a premiere. As Spartacus has rarely been danced by Western companies (the Bavarian State Ballet performed it in 2017, and the Ballet of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma in 2018), I was glad to view a video of the opening night in Krasnoyarsk.

Spartacus is an icon of Russian ballet culture. Its title character, the captive King of Thrace, leads the slave uprising in the Third Servile War (73-71 BC) against the Roman consul Crassus. A man of honor and principles, Spartacus fights for freedom no matter what. But female intrigue undermines the strength of his army and leads to his execution in an unjust one-against-many showdown. Spartacus’s unfaltering—and ultimately self-sacrificial—courage resonates with Russians who have great esteem for their war heroes. (more…)

Battling Self-Doubt

“Cyrano de Bergerac”
Ballet NdB (Národní divadlo Brno)
National Theatre Brno
Brno, Czech Republic
October 27, 2024

by Ilona Landgraf
Copyright © 2024 by Ilona Landgraf

1. Ensemble, “Cyrano de Bergerac” by J.Bubeníček, Ballet NdB 2024 © Ballet NdB Ten years ago, I watched one of Jiří Bubeníček’s early ballets—The Picture of Dorian Gray—which he created and danced with his twin brother, Otto. Since then, the Bubeníčeks regularly cooperated on many productions, with Jiří usually contributing the choreography and Otto the design. Their latest ballet, Cyrano de Bergerac for the Ballet of the National Theatre Brno in the Czech Republic, is also a product of family cooperation, especially given that Jiří’s wife and longstanding artistic collaborator, Nadina Cojocaru, joined the team as costume designer.

Cyrano de Bergerac is based on the eponymous 1897 romantic-comedy verse drama by the French dramatist Edmond Rostand (1868-1918). Rostand modeled the hero after Hector-Savinien de Cyrano (1619-1655), nicknamed Cyrano de Bergerac. A fabulously heroic swordsman, he served in various regiments before quitting the cadet’s life and dedicating himself exclusively to writing prose and love poetry. The prominent nose that affected the love life of his literary representative also graced the real de Cyrano, though it was more moderately sized. (more…)