Mats Ek
Music by Adolphe Adam
Swedish choreographer Mats Ek ranks world-wide as a specialist for telling old ballet stories in new forms. Giselle, one of the great ballets of the 19th century, tells of the unrequited love of the country girl Giselle. Duke Albrecht, disguised as a peasant, wheedles his way into her affections until she is forced to realize that he is in fact in love with Bathilde. Giselle loses her mind and dies of a broken heart.
To the traditional music by Adolphe Adam, Mats Ek has created a completely new choreography in his own, modern idiom. He transferred the plot to the present day. The betrayed Giselle does not awaken to a spectral existence as a wili, but rather finds herself in a mental institution. But even in this radically contemporary version, the essence of the work is retained, and the spectator becomes a witness to the shattering purification process which Albrecht lives through.
Kurt Jooss, (born Jan. 12, 1901, Wasseralfingen, Ger.—died May 22, 1979, Heilbronn, W.Ger.), German dancer, teacher, and choreographer whose dance dramas combined Expressionistic modern-dance movements with fundamental ballet technique.
Initially a music student, Jooss trained in dance from 1920 to 1924 with Rudolf Laban and then worked as choreographer for the avant-garde Neue Tanzbühne (“New Dance Stage”). After studying ballet in Vienna and Paris, Jooss returned to Germany and established a school (1927) and company (1928). In 1930 he became ballet master at the Essen Opera House, where his own group performed. In 1932 he choreographed The Green Table, which ... (100 of 346 words)
In 1933, the Nazis ordered Jooss to dismiss all the Jewish people associated with his company. He refused. As a result, he and many of his dancers had to flee Germany. They found refuge in Holland before resettling in England, where Jooss opened a school with the dancer Sigurd Leeder. After the end of World War II, Jooss returned to Essen where he remained until he retired in 1968. One of his students from this period was the choreographer Pina Bausch.
Jooss disliked plot-less dances and preferred themes that addressed moral issues. His most important choreographic work, The Green Table (1932), won first prize at an international competition for new choreography in Paris in 1932. It was a powerful anti-war statement, made just a year before Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany. It is still performed by dance companies around the world. Another work, Pandora (1944), contained disturbing images of human disaster and tragedy, and was later interpreted as foretelling the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan a year later.
Mats Ek is the son of Anders Ek, one of Sweden’s most celebrated actors, and Birgit Cullberg, the choreographer and artistic director for the Cullberg Ballet Company. He was born in Malmö in 1945, and began a short period of dance studies in 1962 with Donya Feuer in Stockholm; in addition, he later took theatre studies in Norrköping.
In 1974–5, Ek was a member of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, Düsseldorf, then made his choreographic debut in 1976 with The Officer’s Servant, for the Cullberg Ballet, the first of many of his works formed on them.Through such early pieces as Soweto (1977) and The House of Bernarda (1978) he began to gain an international profile, one that was strengthened in the many subsequent works for the Cullberg Ballet, most immediately those of The Four Seasons (1978) and Antigone (1979).
From 1980 to 1984, Ek shared the artistic directorship of the Cullberg Ballet with Birgit Cullberg. Then, in 1985, he was appointed sole artistic director, a post he held until 1993. Giselle (1982) and The Rite of Spring (1984), both for the Cullberg Ballet, had already shown his interest in reinterpreting the classical repertory, one fostered during his time in the company of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, with whom he performed such works as The Sleeping Beauty, Giselle and Romeo and Juliet. This important strand of his choreographic exploration has continued with his own particular slants on the familiar presented in Swan Lake (1987), Carmen (1992) and The Sleeping Beauty (for the Hamburg Ballet, 1996).
