Festival Opening

A single dancer – and piano music by Bach. Wrapped in a dark-blue coat, the man, well past his prime, slowly walks from the rear towards the front and then, later, through columns that start glowing at the inside. Broken pillars out of wood and Plexiglas, nature and artificiality, perhaps a site of sacred rites. The man is not lonely but simply lone, in dialogue with his own body, with space, with sounds, with silence, with time.

Amidst the everyday affairs of idol frenzy and media, of haste and technology, something incredible happens: an interaction of power and tranquillity bestows, in harmony with the music’s lucidity, an idea of what the arts are at times still capable to provide, namely to search in earnest for purity and performance, for the meaning and virtue of life, yet also presaging its end.

Gerhard Bohner was one of the really great personalities of the German dance scene. After he terminated his soloist assignment with the ballet of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, he tried to find his own identity as a soloist. He managed the dance theatre in Darmstadt and later, in cohort with Reinhild Hoffmann, Bremen’s dance theatre. Already marked by his illness, he created and danced the trilogy »Im (Goldenen) Schnitt« (»In the (golden) ratio«), whose always identical pace theme he transferred to perpetually changing rooms.

The Barcelona-born dancer Cesc Gelabert belongs among the presently best-known choreographers in Spain. Together with Lydia Azzopardi, an English woman, he founded the Companyia de Dansa in 1986. Since his initial 1985 guest performance in Berlin, he works there on a regular basis. With profound artistic and human respect towards Bohner, he reconstructed »Im (Goldenen) Schnitt I« and hence resurrected his, so to speak testamentary, creation. It deals with an up until now sole reconstruction of a choreography by Bohner – a stroke of genius of modern dance.