Timeless Contemporary Adventure

Petite Mort

Jiří Kylián created the ballet Petite Mort specifically for the 1991 Salzburg Music Festival, to mark the second centenary of Mozart’s death. Six women and six men dance to excerpts chosen from the composer’s perhaps most beautiful piano concertos (No. 21 & 23) in this extraordinary dance piece. Six fencing foils, which move together with the dancers almost as their partners, also feature in the work, often creating more surprising, more unruly, more distinctive situations than dancing with partners made of flesh and blood. While the foils are symbols of a thousand things for men, masculinity being just one of them, the choreographer stresses femininity with black baroque dresses and bizarre crinolines. These props come to life, moving and rolling, at times forming the women’s bodies and at others drifting apart from them to live a separate existence.

Foils, dresses, torsi, women, men, heads, bodies, and limbs... These elements are not the accessories of some form of provocation; Kylián’s visual symbolism presents a world where aggression, sexuality, silence, music, vulnerability, interdependence and eternal human beauty exist side by side in a particular poetic medium. Majestic and timeless dialogues of frivolous sensuality and heightened emotions take place in the duets and group dances that happen before the spectator’s eyes. “Petite Mort”, literally meaning “little death” in French, refers to sexual fulfilment, the wondrous, passionate moment of ecstasy when reality is briefly lost. The phrase is also used when something tragic happens which affects a person to such an extent that “a part of them dies”. Kylián, following his many impressions of death, expands his ballet woven with symbolic images into a kind of danse macabre. The thought that accompanies people through their entire life, even in its most inspired moments, interweaves the series of gorgeous duets with sometimes unusual solutions that at the same time emanate virtuosic elegance. A bold spectacle, tremendous physical dancing performances, elegance and a sense of style are the hallmarks of this ballet from the choreographer’s mature period.

Rita Major

Six Dances

Six Dances is presented as a pendant to Petite Mort. In Jiří Kylián’s own words: “Mozart, whose music I have chosen for this production, is the greatest example of someone whose lifespan was painfully limited but who nevertheless understood life in all its richness, clownery, and madness... he understood that life is no more than a masquerade, a dress rehearsal for something much deeper and more meaningful... Although the entertaining quality of Mozart’s Six Dances enjoys great popularity, it shouldn’t only be regarded as a burlesque. Its humour ought to serve to point towards our relative values... I decided not to create dance numbers simply reflecting the composer’s humour and musical brilliance. Instead, I have set six seemingly nonsensical acts…”

In the ballet, which premiered in Amsterdam in 1986, Kylián transposed Mozartian playfulness and the absurd reality into the language of dance. He did not wish to relate a storyline, but rather, using the dictionary definition of burlesque, he built a dance number on the nonsensical and comic situations of awkward heroes often behaving unrealistically. Frivolity is not lacking from this piece either; the vivacious scenes are brilliant caricatures of the multifaceted yet familiar relationships of men and women. Besides the scintillating choreography connecting the technique of classical ballet with individual movements specific to the choreographer in memorable combinations reminiscent of social dances, important supporting roles are given to the props: the tussled coiffures, the masked faces, the clouds of powder ascending from the periwigs, the tight breeches, and the flouncy, twirling women’s dresses. In the very first instant, the eight dancers appear on stage like waxworks figures from the age of Mozart. Then the inventiveness, originality and dizzying dynamics of the choreography turn them into increasingly modern, timeless, universal heroes of Kylián’s absurd creative world. And all the while the brilliance of Mozart does not disappear for a moment, ever present in his music, in the ambience, in the visual extravaganza.

Rita Major