Tanztheater

The quartet moves across the stage like a tightly bound knot, until each one finds his position. Yet the boundaries keep blurring. The pianist and the baritone become dancers and the dancers reach for the strings of the grand piano. This is a play about passion and rejection, about the mistakes and confusion in the worlds of young feelings.

Berlin choreographer Hans-Werner Klohe has chosen songs by Hugo Wolf (1860-1903) and piano pieces by Alexander Skrjabin (1872-1915) as the starting point for his dance piece. The poetic fantasies and images that the music triggers are translated into contemporary dance movements. By this means, the stock of classical songs sometimes considered lofty and dusty are brought into the present and given an unexpected relevance.

Hans-Werner Klohe, born in Mannheim in 1970, studied dance and choreography at the ballet academy in Cologne and the Heinz Bosl-Stiftung in Munich. Those he has danced with include Introdans (Netherlands), TanzTheaterBasel, and in the legendary »Swan Lake«-choreography by Matthew Bourne at the New York Broadway. Most recently, he worked with Joachim Schlömer and Sasha Waltz. Since 2001, he has been producing his own dance pieces, which include »RISSE« (2003) and »narziss.04« (2004). His work with Veronica Cendoya, Anne Le Bozec and Christoph Sökler – whose artistic quality can keep up with acting on an international stage – has to be seen a lucky.

»Wolf’s songs win if the singer is choreographically integrated and bravely allows the voice to be physically shaken on the move, standing up or lying down. Thus, the energy flow of the music that the dance is interpreting is reflected back as a movement in the music. This is something that only very few such experiments manage to achieve« (Constanze Klementz, Berliner Morgenpost, 17.09.2005).