2024-10-02 14:17:47
When the British dancer John Cranko came out, he had to leave his homeland and went to the Württemberg State Theater. There he revolutionized ballet. Now his life is coming to the cinema – in an era when even the city of cars and spaetzle was a little wild.
In the end you are moved – once again – when John Cranko’s real companions, still breathing, long bent with age, together with their stand-ins, lay a rose on his real grave in the small cemetery of Solitude Castle, the his last residence. As always, he is moved when the inhabitants of Stuttgart evoke Cranko, still so surprisingly alive in their DNA: the creator of the “Stuttgart Ballet Miracle”, once proclaimed in New York, which still illuminates the company today and who, as a South African, it finally placed Germany on the world ballet map.
Just as John Neumeier, hired in Germany, after Cranko, an American in Hamburg, has just resigned from the position of omnipotent director and creator of (so far) 173 works. He had 51 years to do it. John Cranko, born in 1927, initiated in Stuttgart in 1961 and choked on vomit on the flight home from a tour of America in 1973, had only twelve enigmatic years left, which in retrospect are increasingly transfigured.
But thanks to his choreographic legacy and the radiant vitality of his leading legends, celebrated not only locally, and who still impact the troupe today, are so incredibly present and vivid that now, shortly after the fiftieth anniversary of his death , also to Feature film tried to fathom the John Cranko phenomenon.
Of course with the participation of the Stuttgart Ballet and Cranko’s multilingual associates who wander around at the end of the film: Marcia Haydee (87 – his favorite Brazilian dancer and later director, who stepped forward against everyone’s wishes), Birgit Keil (80 – his little Sudeten dancer), Egon Madsen (82 – his Danish dance buffoon), Reid Anderson (75 – one of the last group dancers chosen for Stuttgart, later director of the ballet), Dieter Graefe (secretary of the East Prussia recently died at 84, Anderson’s last lover, heir and husband), Jürgen Rose (87 – her Magdeburg stylist) and Georgette Tsinguridis (96 – her Greek choreographer, who recorded her ballets for eternity) .
He smokes constantly, drinks hard alcohol and when he can’t sleep due to depression, he takes pills. It’s the Sixties and attention to the body no longer exists. And certainly not for an artist who is constantly under creative stress and under a strong emotional current.
John Cranko does not carry out his administrative work in his office, but rather next to the bar, but above all in the canteen. If there’s anything to celebrate, it’s Greek. A short-lived lover driving a truck flees the ballroom, annoyed by so much high culture; Instead, a male Dalmatian named Arthur struts there later, unconcerned. He remains Cranko’s most faithful companion.
This man comes to Stuttgart because he is looking for “love and passion” in art, as he tells the taxi driver who takes him directly to the Eckensee in front of the Württemberg State Theatre, because in England he has no longer suffered from being gay as a man, and even Princess Margaret (“Sorry, Darling”) can do nothing for him. In the office of the state director Papa Schäfer (terribly sober: Hanns Zischler) there is a curly-haired man with a heavy accent, who believes in him, but does not like his visions at all (like those of the prima ballerina Haydée), and transforms a metropolis producing cars and tasting spätzle, just liberated from the rubble of war, into a paradise for artists and, above all, into a metropolis of ballet.
Biography of an era
Just as his future choreographies have already been reflected in his students and the not yet hired dancers of tomorrow have floated on the opera’s scales. Dream and reality repeatedly blur in Joachim A. Lang’s “Cranko,” the biopic about a choreographer shot with a lot of love and knowledge of the profession, in an extremely fluid way that carries forward this breathless drama of life. A rarity, but successful. Also because it shows: there wasn’t much money, but it still manages to subtly and complexly evoke the bourgeois sixties, but in many ways still relaxed, in the original atmosphere.
On the one hand, this is due to the wonderful breakdown of the German wheel Sam Riley in the role of Cranko. He doesn’t look like him, but he is completely absorbed in this nervous, generous and generous soul, but he doesn’t find it himself. Joy and pain, success and disappointment are found here side by side, in continuous alternation, because obviously the nostalgic rush through this biography also serves as an image of the times: which knows how to transmit to posterity something different, more ecstatic and fluctuating. compared to many other documentaries of this era which naturally slowly fades away. But Riley is always his center.
Secondly, Philipp Sichler’s virtuoso camera captures the atmosphere of the ballroom which, optically breaking down all imaginary walls, expands into an immersive stage with characteristic excerpts from Cranko’s work. And this is where the current Stuttgart dance stars shine, who not only re-propose the steps they are familiar with, but also interpret their historic predecessors: Elisa Badenes (Haydée), Jason Railey (Ray Barra), Rocio Aleman (Keil), Marti Paixa (Richard Cragun), Henrik Erikson (Madsen), Friedemann Vogel (Heinz Claus).
They might seem a little wooden as pure actors, but the transformation in the dance scenes that eventually culminate in the signature piece “Initials RBME” to Brahms’ 2nd Piano Concerto, which quickly take on a cinematic life of their own, is what makes “ Cranko” so authentic and valid. This choreographer simply turned people on, turned on movement and gave meaning to ballet.
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