German première

»Sound disturbance« – Two muscle-bound dancers challenge gravity with feats of athleticism. They play their game, ranging from the comic to the burlesque, from the ridiculous to the humorous, fluctuating between the extremes of total humor and deepest seriousness, while a viola plays a dreamy melody by Gustav Mahler.

The famous composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), who also lived and worked in Leipzig, died 100 years ago. What the Danish choreographer Palle Granhøj is now doing with his music is provocative and seems strange at first. Themes such as melancholy and loneliness, pain and death, which always inhabit the music of Mahler, cannot be increased with pathos and, in this sense, also cannot be danced. Palle Granhøj is taking a different tack: humour allows humanity to return and provides an impulse for a complex examination of Mahler’s evanescence, desire and love.

Palle Granhøj, born in 1959 in Hjørring, began dancing in 1986 and created his first choreography, »Torzo«, in 1990. In the same year he founded the company Granhøj Dans, which he continues to lead. Granhøj has received numerous awards, including the Reumert Prisen 2001 for the piece »Headbreak«. He is one of the most well-known choreographers in Denmark and has conducted guest performances with his company in more than 30 countries.

»This Mahler performance describes how muscles are introduced to death by way of music. Totally unpathetic, masculine, raw, and ironic« (Anne Middelboe Christensen, Dagbladet Information, Kopenhagen, 04.03.2011).