Let football fans know that the German city of Dortmund not only has an excellent football team – which will fight in the Champions League final next week – but also an all-terrain ballet that this week (until Sunday) is leaving the audience of the Liceu stunned. There were six minutes of applause and a standing ovation yesterday, at the premiere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Nordic solstice, with the theater at 80%, but the euphoria of a full house.
The company directed by the Chinese Xin Peng Wang made its debut on La Rambla yesterday with an impact piece, the creation of this new Swedish dance star, Aleksander Ekman (Stockholm, 1984), who after succeeding with his particular Swan Lake by Den Norske Ballett dared in 2015 with this Midsummer night’s dream, a Swedish Shakespeare, with hay bales, sunny nights, Scandinavian mythology and a dreamlike dimension with Bergman ramblings and Fellini aspirations… especially when a large fish bursts in, floating in the 8 ½-style landscape.
Up to 32 dancers – with Barcelona’s Júlia Baró among the ranks – took the stage of the Liceu in all its depth to stage this phantasmagoric Dionysian party that takes place in dreams (or not) and that rises, sensual, playful, above the telluric forces of nature. They dance now barefoot, now in pointe shoes, in a mixture of neoclassical, contemporary and acrobatics that defines Ekman so much. And they are quick to recreate all kinds of fantastic creatures, such as the articulated centipede, among the winking humor that Ekman serves with intelligence, also turning to the theater of the East and the men in the headless suit.
As in the Lake, Ekman does not resort to the classical score. He entrusts it to his compatriot Mikael Karlsson, an accomplished composer who has just premiered an operatic version of the film Melancolia (Lars von Trier) at the Stockholm Opera. At the Liceu, it has half a dozen soloists from the Dortmunder Philharmoniker, in addition to the Swedish pop star Anna von Hausswolff, with a refined (and amplified) singing that gets the audience to also enter that special dreamlike state of the protagonist.
Magic, beauty, poetry, silences, plastic pictures in this almost opera with references to Forsythe and his deconstruction of the classic or Jan Fabre’s bacchanal at Mount Olympus, in addition to evocations of common places: the sedated Bob Fosse of All that jazz.
It must not be easy to be a choreographer, Swedish and millennial under the long shadow of Mats Ek and the planetary lyrical heritage of Bergman. The global world is also global in the artistic world, and Ekman defends himself in the absence of rules and a predilection for the great show that can sometimes discourage criticism. But the author of Thoughts on Bergman (for the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées) aspires to reach the general public with scenes of accessible reading far from realism: worlds inspired by life.
Perhaps this one will not go down in the history of midsummer dreams – Petipa (1876), Fokine (1906), Balanchine (1962), Ahston (1964), Neumeier (1977)–, but it has been consolidating itself as a magnetic proposition that has been catching on since of the first rhythmic dance on a field of golden straw.
Do not miss it!
