Richard Siegal – Landgraf on Dance

“Malditos Benditos”
Ballet of the State Theater Nuremberg
State Theater
Nuremberg, Germany
July 10, 2025

by Ilona Landgraf
Copyright © 2025 by Ilona Landgraf

Malditos Benditos (“Damned Blessed Ones”) is Goyo Montero’s farewell piece to Nuremberg. After seventeen years as artistic director of the State Theater’s ballet company, the Spaniard will leave for the State Ballet Hanover this autumn to take up the reins Marco Goecke was forced to give up in 2023. Richard Siegal, director of the Cologne-based Ballet of Difference, will succeed Montero in Nuremberg and bring his dancers along. They will merge with their Nuremberg colleagues into the State Theater Nuremberg Ballet of Difference.
Malditos Benditos is the counterpart to Benditos Malditos, Montero’s first creation in Nuremberg in 2008. Many of the intervening twenty-five productions are reflected in Malditos Benditos. Applause blended into the medley of musical snippets and electronic noise as the black curtain rose. The black-suited dancers (costumes by Goyo Montero and Margaux Manns) bowed to the applause of an imaginary audience at the rear stage, framed by a bright red curtain. Continue reading “A Recap”

“Triple”
Richard Siegal – Ballet of Difference
Forum Ludwigsburg
Ludwigsburg, Germany
January 21, 2023

Last weekend, the Cologne-based troupe Richard Siegal – Ballet of Difference toured the Forum Ludwigsburg. The American-born Siegal founded the company in 2016 in Munich. He also serves as its artistic director and has choreographed nearly all of their repertoire. The triple bill in Ludwigsburg combined twenty-or-so minute-long pieces created between 2014 – 2021.

In a recent interview, Siegal revealed that “All For One” is a “reaction to the modes of digital spectatorship that emerged during the beginning of the pandemic.” The piece premiered online in fall 2021 with a set (an organ made from tall tubes of light arranged in a cylindrical semicircle) designed, perhaps, to appeal to an online audience. In Ludwigsburg, the murky illumination often hid the eleven dancers in twilight that obscured their pants, skirts, and bustiers (decorated with bulky silver folds that resembled supersized shreds of paper). Continue reading “Trashy”