2023-05-30 08:01:00
Mario Schröder’s and Harry Yeff’s production opens up new aesthetic worlds and ultimately catches the audience
With his latest creation “Fusion” (as with his “Panta Rhei” choreography), the Leipzig ballet director Mario Schröder is on course to explore new aesthetic territory. This time not with the Gewandhaus Orchestra, but to the soundtrack, which Harry Yeff (pronounced: Reeps 100) and Gadi Sassoon contribute live. It is an exploratory excursion that is said to lead into the vastness of artificial intelligence for ninety minutes at the Leipzig Opera, which is not entirely sold out think.
This could be done in abstractly choreographed variations across all five declared stations (from “Genesis – from the unborn to modern society”, “Artificial Intelligence”, “Restart Gifts from the AI”, “Deconstruction” and “Fusion of Humans, Nature and Technology”) deal with the tension between space and mass, between voice and movement or between coincidence and intention. All of that is actually being negotiated here. The suggestive power of the abstract images that are created on the stage by outfitter Paul Zoller could also have the human face as a whole in its sights. From the first primal breath, which one hears when the Iron Curtain majestically opens and in the shimmering semi-darkness some of the dancers hover in the shimmering semi-darkness like beings who have been put to deep sleep between mysterious portions of light above another diffuse group lying on the ground. Out of this grandiose opening image, human, still speechless life slowly and pulsatingly awakens. The first attempts at walking by these upright beings seem awkward. As individuals, these people discover themselves at the sight of their reflection in a pool of water, which initially astonishes them. When clear geometric shapes emerge above them in the video and a torrent of water splashes down on them from above, this is not immediately the deluge, but one of those impulses that set a self-learning system in motion, the dynamics of which may lead to what we now call AI.
Alienated voice as part of the organism
With his alienated voice, Harry Yeff as a performer is always a visible part of this unfolding organism of sound and movement. A climax of this crescendo of suggestive fascination of a living universe of sound and movement on a journey through time is provided by the direct connection of Yeff’s acoustic specifications and the individuality of seven dancers, which come to their senses in the movement, in each of the briefly appearing cones of light. The effect relies on at least the appearance of spontaneous improvisation. The opulent effect that can be achieved with a huge gauze cloth and some stage wind is also amazing!
Mutants and spider creatures populate post-apocalyptic vision
#In the end, novel, eight-limbed beings move across the stage. They scurry about on the ground like crabs on the beach. In between upright walking mutants. What determines the final image here under the label “Fusion of Man, Nature and Technology”, into which Yeff as the voice of the evening also fits, could just as well be understood as a kind of post-apocalyptic vision.
This symbiosis of sound and movement that Schröder and Yeff have developed here is always gripping and fascinating. And one wonders whether the people of Leipzig know what they’re doing if rumors come true that they don’t want to extend the contract with Schröder at the Leipzig Opera.
In any case, the audience celebrated “Fusion” euphorically.
More performances from “Fusion” this Monday and June 2nd, 7th and 30th.
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