"Multiplicity, Forms of Silence and emptiness"

by Loïc le Duc

Traduction : Carolina Masjuan

Photo : Erik Berg

Oslo Opera House season opening with the entry at the National Ballet repertoire of "Multiplicity, Forms of Silence and emptiness" by Nacho Duato. After "Por vos muero", "White Darkness" and "Arcangelo", "Multiplicity, Forms of Silence and emptiness" is the fourth piece that the Spanish choreographer gives to the Norwegian company.

Native of Valencia, Nacho Duato has trained at the Rambert School in London, then at Béjart and with Alvin Ailey where he was the only white dancer in the company. He joined the Ek’s company before meeting Kylian at the Nederlands Dans Theater. Powerful dancer, complex and sexy, yet he is as a choreographer that he will definitely be known. His aura allowed him to be appointed as artistic director of the National Compañia de Danza in Madrid (1990) and at the Mikhaïlowski Theatre in St. Petersburg (2011).

Photo : Erik Berg

"Multiplicity, Forms of Silence and emptiness", created for the city of Weimar (1999), is a tribute to the music of Bach, with a splendid art structures, lots of humour at times, and alternating perfectly ordered meditation and agitation. The dancers of the National Ballet of Norway are amazing of diversity, virtuosity and theatricality: rigor of form, constant energy, vivacity that permanently launches body and limbs in a thousand directions at once, with an almost rubbery flexibility or athletic strength seeming to alter their morphology. Strength and relaxation of the basin allow freedom of the bust, arms and legs. The movement is continuous, smoothly underlined by the classical vocabulary used ... We can only welcome the incredible arms calligraphy, which sometimes seems to precede the rest of the body. And throughout his writing, choreographer sows and other small discrete spins thrown in reducing an excessive virtuosity. There, the dancers glide, leg sweeping the stage to finish with a roll: they are as worn by music. Nothing revolutionary, certainly. Just work carved in the air of time. The staging is conceived to be simple and effective, reduced to a few stools desks, a screen and a metallic structure in the background, a representation of a blank musical score.

Photo : Erik Berg

"Multiplicity, Forms of Silence and emptiness" is certainly the most sophisticated Nacho Duato's ballet. Divided into two parts, "Multiplicity", reflects dance images inspired by the music of the brilliant composer. Extroverted, sometimes comical, this first part is characterized by choreographic variety and diversity that correspond to the various musical excerpts assembled here. The prelude of the Suite No. 1, highlighted by Emma Lloyd cello which is in the hands of Ole Willy Falkhaugen (JS Bach) Brandenburg concertos written for Anna Magdalena, the "allegro" away everything in its path. Of these two men dragonflies (Philip Currell and Andreas Heise) who flutter around Bach ... inventive shadows (Yolanda Correa, Leyna Magbutay, Chihiro Nomura), everything is rapture. Sets group may be less convincing. All the zeal of the Norway National Ballet must be there to raise the level. Costumes are inventive, moving with the body, or giving forms involved in this fun and outgoing atmosphere.

Photo : Erik Berg

"Forms of Silence and emptiness" is darker, more architectural. The tone is more introspective, mystical, spiritual. It refers to the theme of death, so present in the writing of the German composer who can not help instructing its partitions with sore chromatic figurations: the child of nine years which saw in a rapid succession how his mother died first and then his father too, the accomplished man hit hard by the sudden death of his wife, ten children died in infancy, the one of his adult son, the task of making cantor sing motets and choral funeral canticles at mortuary homes ... Bach's life was marked with the seal of death. "Forms of Silence and emptiness" is based mainly on the Art of Fugue, composed by Bach at the end of his life. The final duo of the piece that sees the confrontation between Bach and "death" is masterfully interpreted by Ole Willy Falkhaugen and Eugenie Skilnand.

Then, one by one, dressed in black, the dancers return to the levels of the scaffolding, they align and pose, like musical notes crying their mourning for the Leipzig genius passing away.

Photo : Erik Berg

Norwegian National Ballet
Performance on 4th october 2012