Zurich Ballet: History, ensemble, repertoire

Compared with Paris or London, Vienna or Copenhagen, Zurich is a young dance city that only entered the annals of international dance history at the beginning of the 20th century. Shortly before the First World War, Rudolf von Laban, one of the great innovators of European dance, founded a school in Zurich through which the city was to become “one of the focuses of modern expressive dance”. According to Horst Koegler’s ballet lexicon, however, the ballet at the Stadttheater (City Theatre) “fulfilled a merely decorative function in the theatre’s productions of opera and operetta”. The ballet company first attracted wider interest for four years in the 1930s, when the Yugoslav husband-and-wife team, dancers Pia and Pino Mlakar, acted as artistic directors.

The first significant work in the period after the Second World War was done by the British choreographer Nicholas Beriozoff, who was originally from Lithuania. Beriozoff ran the Zurich Opera company from 1964 until 1971, and ensured above all that it acquired a solid classical repertoire. However, Beriozoff’s tenure was followed by a period of instability and rapid changes of leadership. The Frenchman Michel Descombey was replaced by the British director Geoffrey Cauley, who in turn was followed by the dual management of the Swiss choreographers Hans Meister and Jürg Burth. Nobody lasted longer than two or three seasons at the head of Zurich Ballet. All the same, Rudolf Nureyev came in 1972 and rehearsed his version of “Raymonda” with the ensemble, followed by “Don Quixote” and his interpretation of “Manfred”. Only when Patricia Neary, a former ballerina at the New York City Ballet, arrived as Ballet Director in 1978 did the company enjoy a certain serenity and continuity. Neary stayed until 1985 – as long as Beriozoff, at least –, and concentrated all her efforts, without any personal ambition, on making Zurich Ballet the most important exponent of Balanchine’s works, with the best and most extensive repertoire of the great choreographer in Europe.
The decade from the mid-1980s until the mid-1990s belonged to two young choreographers, who, probably overstretched, made rather unfortunate directors of Zurich Ballet. The German choreographer Uwe Scholz, who had been celebrated at the Stuttgart Ballet as an outstanding talent and held his first directorial position in Zurich at the early age of 27, gave his début in Zurich with a full-length choreography of Haydn’s oratorio, “The Creation”, which was slammed by the critics, after which he never really gained a foothold. After five increasingly unsuccessful years he was replaced by the similarly youthful Viennese choreographer Bernd Roger Bienert, who attracted attention through his collaboration with some of Europe’s most renowned architects and staged several attractive reconstructions of works from the early days of modern dance, but was ultimately as unsuccessful as his predecessor.

When Heinz Spoerli became Director of Zurich Ballet in 1996, it was certainly not as run down as had been the case when he took over the Ballet of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein five years previously. Yet nor would anybody have considered Zurich Ballet to be one of the leading European ballet companies, to which it undoubtedly belongs at the beginning of the 21st century. Spoerli achieved the great leap forward in a similarly short period as he had done in Düsseldorf, thanks to four interrelated factors: the quality-conscious selection of the right dancers, irrespective of national considerations, first-class training by ballet masters such as Peter Appel, Chris Jensen (with whom he had already collaborated in Basel and Düsseldorf) and the Frenchman Jean-François Boisnon, a wise repertoire policy that was only satisfied with the best, and the quality of Spoerli’s own choreographies, which naturally form the main focus of the company’s repertoire.

It is truism of dance history that important ballet ensembles can only be created in collaboration with important choreographers. This was already true in the 19th century and remains so in the 21st. The Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen owes its outstanding, astonishingly preserved position to the wonderful August Bournonville, and the ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg still owes its reputation to Marius Petipa from the time of the tsars. Without Frederick Ashton, London’s Royal Ballet would never have progressed beyond a provincial role, and without George Balanchine the New York City Ballet would never have become the number one among the world’s great ballet companies. It is a similar story for the Nederlands Dans Theater and its duo of choreographers Hans van Manen and Jirí Kylián, the Brussels Ballet du XXe siècle and Maurice Béjart, the Tanztheater Wuppertal and Pina Bausch, and the Frankfurt Ballet with William Forsythe. The combination of Zurich Ballet and Heinz Spoerli has long since joined the ranks of these renowned companies.
Since his arrival in 1996, Ballet Director Spoerli has bought for his dancers some of the best choreographies available on the international market, including works by George Balanchine such as “Serenade”, “Theme and Variations”, “Stravinsky Violin Concerto”, “Allegro brillante”, “Duo Concertant”, “Rubies” and “Symphony in C”; choreographies by Hans van Manen, such as “Grosse Fuge”, “Solo” “Metaforen”, “Black Cake” and “Déjà-vu”; pieces by William Forsythe such as “In The Middle, Somewhat Elevated” and “Herman, Schmerman”; as well as Merce Cunningham’s “Summerspace” and Twyla Tharp’s “Push Comes To Shove”. However, Spoerli has frequently staged these pieces alongside his own choreographies, which are of equal standing.
Most of the choreographies that Heinz Spoerli has asked his Zurich dancers to perform he created especially for them. However, he sensibly did not hesitate to transfer at least one of the pieces that he had already choreographed in Düsseldorf to Zurich (with new costumes) – the “Goldberg Variations”, set to Johann Sebastian Bach’s piano cycle. With this piece, the choreographer Spoerli experimented with a new dramaturgy of the feature-length ballet: neither abstract nor a pure interpretation of the music, but rather an attempt to express “life passing us by” in terms of dance: couples that find and then lose each other, changing views and insights. As the combination and confrontation of bodies always result in relationships, emotions and tensions, the “Goldberg Variations” are never really abstract; the unusually large number of dancers and the length of their journey together provide an extraordinary wealth of possibilities.
Spoerli, who for decades has enjoyed great success primarily as a master of narrative ballet, may now have created a new dimension and a new genre as a mature choreographer (after all, he celebrated his 70th birthday in the autumn of 2010): pure dance with only the barest hint of a plot.
The feature-length “Brahms. Ein Ballett”, choreographed exclusively to chamber music by the composer, impressed audiences with a concept that is intended to illustrate “Brahms’s inner strife between gruelling yet fulfilling creativity and the unfulfilled yearning for love”. By sublimating unlived life as art, the work is a complex reflection of the composer’s alienation on the stage.
The beginning of the Mozart ballet entitled “Eine lichte, helle, schöne Ferne” patters and oscillates as daintily as if someone had expertly brought the most adorable Meissen porcelain figurines to life. In the second part, however, not only the music, but the entire action on stage becomes heavily overcast, alternating between light and shade to create a ravishing piece of classical ballet that does more justice to Mozart than most popular Mozart choreographies, while avoiding false ingratiation with Mozart, the “son of the gods”.

Spoerli’s interpretation of Schubert’s C major string quartet does tell a story, but so carefully that it is difficult to describe it without ambiguity. Although there are five dancers in solo roles on stage (before an exceedingly sparingly deployed ensemble of five couples), it would not be right to describe them as the dancing equivalents of the five string instruments. Spoerli’s story preserves its mystique. Neither the constellation, nor the character of the performers, nor their neo-romantic, softly flowing movements – which do not shy away from the virtuosity of great leaps and dramatic lifts – is explicit. Spoerli lends the dance an unreal lightness, something playful that removes any aspect of regret or tragedy even from death (if death has any role at all to play for his dancing quintet).
The Bach choreographies “und mied den Wind”, “All Shall Be”, and “In den Winden im Nichts” rely primarily on virtuoso athleticism; their movements benefit from floor exercises and acrobatics as well as many lifting and spinning movements, right up to the veritable death spiral inspired by figure skating; even synchronised swimming is apparent in the circling leg movements of the ballerinas, held head-down.
Spoerli’s choreographies usually consider the women of the ensemble, led by the ballerinas Yen Han, Lara Radda and Karine Seneca, at least as well as their male colleagues. But in the pieces dedicated to the composers Brahms, Mozart and Bach, the men quite clearly predominate: the fabulous Michael Revie in “Eine lichte, helle, schöne Ferne”, and Jens Weber, Federico Bonelli, François Petit (and again Revie) in the Bach ballets.
One of the best works by Spoerli currently in the Zurich repertoire is a four-part evening from the autumn of 2000 entitled “Approaching Clouds”, which does not contain a single narrative ballet in the traditional sense. At most, the Schumann choreography first performed in Düsseldorf, “Szenen”, has the hint of a storyline; but this is so vague and blurred, so completely dissolved in the dance, that the piece can hardly be considered a narrative ballet.
“Approaching Clouds”, the piece that lends the evening its title, involves two couples and two men in a virtuoso network of relationships consisting of encounters and farewells, performed to Alfred Schnittke’s first Sonata for Violoncello and Piano. “Phase”, to music by Steve Reich, combines the sparing movements of a seven-strong ensemble, continuously intensifying them with synchronised arm signals, little sidesteps, and playful scuttling on the balls of the feet. The movements of the dancers are trumped by initially only minimal, but then increasingly conspicuous changes in the video panel behind them, which consists of segments showing different motifs.

However, in their interpretation of Luciano Berio’s “Folk Songs” of 1964, the choreographer and his set designer Florian Etti amaze audiences with veritable magic tricks. In an imaginary, slightly diagonal line at the back of the stage dance real swirling clouds, from which the eight dancers constantly emerge as if from nowhere and into which they disappear again. In a section of the stage immediately in front of the swirling clouds they drag long shadows of black light behind them, thanks to Robertus Cremer’s ingenious lighting. But the strong impression that “Folk Songs” leaves is not due merely to the stage set and its magic tricks. The movements are also richly and imaginatively inventive. With a large, thirty-strong ensemble, Spoerli pulls out all the stops of dance-like orchestration. He relies not only on the bravura of his excellent soloists, but also on the sheer impact of duplicated movements that climax in an exhilarating finale.

Of course an enormous work like Rameau’s ballet-opera “Les Indes Galantes”, in which Spoerli placed the dance on an equal footing with the music in the spring of 2003, cannot be a permanent part of the repertoire of a ballet company affiliated with an opera house. Yet nor is that necessary. The combination of a fine selection of classical and contemporary narrative ballets – a luscious “Midsummer Night’s Dream”, a filigree “Giselle”, a “Fille mal gardée” bursting with life, a “Nutcracker” developed far beyond a Christmas fairytale, the Prokofiev pieces “Romeo and Juliet” and “Cinderella”, the latter magnificently swathed in kilometres of the finest silk, and since the winter of 2002 a new version of the feature-length “La Belle Vie” created originally for Basel, which brilliantly reflects the Belle Epoque with all its advantages, social and human problems – and pure dance pieces result in a repertoire that almost no other contemporary ballet company can call its own.