Let football fans know that the German city of Dortmund not only has an excellent football team – which will fight to advance to the Champions League semi-finals next week – but also with an all-terrain ballet that this week (until Sunday) is leaving the Liceu public stunned. There were six minutes of applause and standing ovation yesterday, at the premiere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the key of the Nordic solstice, with the theater at 80% but the euphoria of a full house.
The company directed by the Chinese by Den Norske Ballett, dared in 2015 with this Midsummer Night’s Dream, a Swedish-style Shakespeare, with bales of hay, sunny nights, Scandinavian mythology and dreamlike dimension with hints of Bergman and Feline aspirations… especially when a large fish floating in the landscape 8 ½ style.
Up to 32 dancers – with the Barcelonan Júlia Baró among their ranks – took the stage of the Liceu in all its depth to stage this phantasmagorical Dionysian party that takes place in dreams (or not) and that rises, sensual, playful, above the forces telluric of nature. They dance now barefoot and now on pointe, in that mixture of neoclassical, contemporary and acrobatics that so defines Ekman. And they are ready to recreate all kinds of fantastic creatures, such as the articulated millipede, among the winks of humor that Ekman intelligently uses, also making use of Eastern theater and those men in headless suits.
As in the Lake, Ekman does not resort to the classical score. He entrusts it to his compatriot Mikael Karlsson, an outstanding composer who has just premiered an operatic version of the film Melancholy (Lars von Trier) at the Stockholm Opera. At the Liceu it features half a dozen soloists from the Dortmunder Philharmoniker as well as the Swedish pop star Anna von Hausswolff, with a refined (and amplified) singing that makes the audience also enter that special dreamlike state of the protagonist.
Magic, beauty, poetry, silences, plastic paintings in this quasi-opera with references to Forsythe and his deconstruction of the classic or to Jan Fabre’s bacchanal at Mount Olympus, as well as 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 artistic, and Ekman defends himself in the absence of rules and a predilection for the big show that can sometimes discourage critics. But the author of Thoughts on Bergman (for the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées) aspires to reach the general public with accessible reading scenes far from realism: worlds inspired by life.
Perhaps this 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 proposal that has been engaging since the first rhythmic dance on a field of golden straw.
Do not miss it!
