stage lighting

Description

No More Play (1988) by Jiri Kylian's "Black and White Ballets" Music by Anton Webern Dancers: Birgitte Martin, Lorraine Blouin, Patrick Delcroix, Ken Ossola, Paul Lightfoot Jiri Kylian's inspiration for this piece came from a small sculpture by Alberto Giacometti: a simple, formless board game with small wood shavings and indentations, as well as two pieces of wood resembling human beings. The highly dynamic tension that this work of art produced in the choreographer and a feeling of unavoidability determine the character of the ballet "No More Play". The viewer sees himself as a participant in a rough, tough game whose rules were forgotten long ago. Only gradually and one by one does he discover the forgotten rules, but always when it is already too late, when he has already fallen into the trap. The music is such an important foundation for the choreographer's work that the serial, aleatoric choreography of the piece "No More Play" immediately makes it clear that the music could not have been written by anyone else than Anton Webern. Music and movement fuse to a unity so fitting that one would have a hard time separating the individual components again. The Rococo costumes appear here only fleetingly, as if they did not want to distract attention from the stage lighting, which can hardly be called more than fragmentary. It underscores the asymmetric choreography of two groups of dancers in a special way: one pair and a group of three feel their way into the fragmentary musical structure of Anton Webern's Five Movements fot String Quartet. The dancers smoothly and precisely meliorate the outbreaks of the score, especially when the male dancers lift the female dancers in slow-motion. The seemingly frozen motions extend to the point where the viewer expects the dancers to lose their balance. Their intensity corresponds to the musical structure of the quartet, in which the composer combines the classic imitative arts like variation and counterpoint with his own serial technique of composition. Filling the rear end of the stage as well with dancing action is another of the central ideas in the artistic work of Jiri Kylian. This does not remain a mere gimmick, but always clearly corresponds to the theme of the respective choreography, arising as if naturally from it, as well as from the chosen costumes and sets (in this case both designed by the choreographer himself) and from the lighting. In "No More Play", the dancers cross the stage background and disappear in the darkness, out of which the stage set elements can barely be made out when the figures pass by them. The lighting creates an effect like the figures on a frieze, a relief against whose background a pas de deux is simultaneously carried out by a pair creeping on the floor.