Goecke / Robbins / Bausch
Featuring Teatro dell’Opera di Roma's highly respected orchestra, as well as its stars, principal dancers and corps de ballet, Goecke / Robbins / Bausch is a ballet triple bill at Rome's Teatro Costanzi. The three works on this enthralling programme feature music by Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy, two of the most innovative composers of ballet music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Audience goers can expect a great deal of high-quality music and movement in an auditorium that has staged many notable balletic performances before.
The ballet spectacle opens with Petrushka, Marco Goecke's reimagined version of the ballet Stravinsky initially wrote for Sergei Diaghilev's famous Ballets Russes company. The original version of the ballet, choreographed by Fokine and drawn from Russian folklore and traditions, was first performed on 13 June 1911 at Paris’ Théâtre du Châtelet. It tells the story of the jealousies and affections of three puppets who have been magically brought to life. Goecke's version is immediately distinguishable from Fokine's due to its minimalistic style and psychological approach. The German-born choreographer explores the movement possibilities the trio of puppets afford dancers with less emphasis on narrative than other versions of the ballet. Goecke first choreographed Petrushka for Ballett Zürich in 2016.
Debussy wrote Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune as a tone poem, based on the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, a renowned symbolist writer. It premiered on 22 December 1894, also in Paris. In 1912, Vaslav Nijinsky presented his famous balletic interpretation of the piece, drawing on themes both in the music and the poem. The second ballet on the bill, Afternoon of a Faun, is another reworking from the 20th century with choreography by Jerome Robbins, who was also a film director and a theatre producer in addition to being a renowned choreographer. Afternoon of a Faun is a pas-de-deux and its debut was held on 14 May 1953 at the City Center of Music and Drama in New York City.
The finale of the programme is Le Sacre du Printemps, directed and choreographed by Pina Bausch, a German ballet specialist known for her development of neo-expressionist dance. Set to Stravinsky's epic Rite of Spring, this ballet was first presented in 1975 at the Tanztheater Wuppertal with a distinctive stage design that required the performance space to be covered with earth. The great Russian composer also wrote the music for this ballet originally for Diaghilev and it became instantly famous for its use of then-shocking dissonance and cross-rhythms. Bausch has won many plaudits for her version of this much-admired ballet, not least for the way she interprets Stravinsky's sometimes complex music into a physical form.
All three ballets at Rome's Teatro dell’Opera offer the chance to see some of the most forward-thinking choreography of the late 20th and early 21st centuries together.