CHoreographer John Neumeier fulfills the task of the title “The Unseen Ones” in his most recent world premiere with an incredibly strong dance and theater evening by the National Youth Ballet. Supplemented by three actors, the company makes visible the dancers who emigrated, were persecuted, arrested under National Socialism and who were known abroad as “German Dance”, and which developed in the 1920s. The Hamburg ballet director does not try to reconstruct the dances historically, but can rely on his artistic power of association, with the help of which he draws a realistic picture.
Expressionist dancer Mary Wigman brought to life
Based on and along the biographies of Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban, Gret Palucca, Harald Kreuberg and Alexander von Swaine, the ten young dancers of the company, the actresses Louisa Stroux and Isabella Vértes-Schütter and the actor Maximilian von Mühlen tell how the Nazis controlled art politically and used it as a nationalist instrument, how Jewish dance students and artists were excluded and persecuted – as were members of other minorities such as Sinti and Roma. In addition, as is well known, gay artists were also sent to concentration camps.
The great time revue, described by Neumeier as a “dance collage”, in which the narrative is by no means chronological, but in which the choreographer allows thematically justified, virtuoso handled leaps in time, arise in the first part of the evening and until the middle of the second part deep below images that go through the skin. They range from the beauty of free artistic development through expressive dance to being trapped in fear or specifically in prison – including ideology.
Young dancers introduce themselves
The National Youth Ballet is accompanied on stage with imaginative, lively choreographies ranging from cheerful to deadly sad, mostly chamber music live on the grand piano. At the beginning of the show, after the introductory dance, the members of the company introduce themselves to the audience by name and tell them which country they come from, one of them casually describes himself as “queer”, two others as gay. Due to the relaxed start as a contrast, the evening gets an enormous drop.
Scene from “The Invisibles”
Which: Kiran West/© Kiran West
This is underlined by the chosen location. The “Fokine-Studio” of the Ballet Center of the Hamburg Ballet in Caspar-Voght-Strasse in Hamm will be shown on the stage of the Ernst Deutsch Theater. The mural “Orpheus with the Animals” there was created by the Hamburg painter Anita Rée and represents the passage of time with its history. Rée, who took her own life as a Jewish, avant-garde artist after being ostracized by the Nazis in 1933, created the picture as early as 1929 on behalf of Fritz Schumacher. During the Nazi era it was painted over, later reconstructed, ruined in physical education classes, reconstructed and protected again, finally covered and only rediscovered and uncovered in 1983. Just as this image became visible again, so should the biographies of the dancers who are still unknown today, the biographies of the “invisibles” – a broad field for dance historical research, the number of unreported cases is high.
Impressive dance through contemporary history
Right at the beginning, Neumeier also begins to clarify the term “emigrant”, which develops over the course of time. First of all, he makes it immediately understandable: by understanding the terror of those affected, who are forced to redefine themselves to save themselves from abroad. Bertolt Brecht is later quoted, who wanted to speak more appropriately of “persecuted” instead of “emigrants”. From the very beginning there is also dancing, whatever the stage allows. In the selection of music, Neumeier strikes the right note with the sounds of the times.
The musical path ranges from Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps” to “Somewhere in the World” by the Comedian Harmonists, Richard Strauss and Erich Wolfgang Korngold to “Ladies in Lavender” by Nigel Hess. The quotes recited by the artists about their love of dance and its importance for their lives are juxtaposed with tough Nazi texts such as instructions from the Nazi Reich Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust. And in the dance, too, the artists encounter dully marching Nazis in uniforms with swastika armbands.
Complex dance language expresses even fleeting feelings
Meanwhile, Neumeier’s formal language of dance has become unbelievably complex, even fleeting inner impulses are narrated by eloquent bodies. The young dancers of the National Youth Ballet deliver a highly committed, masterful evening in constantly changing images that illustrate how the narrow-minded, fascist ideology crashes as a wave over free art and drowns it. They range from the enthusiastic costume dances of the expressive dancers to mountains of corpses after mass shootings. Isabella Vértes-Schütter succeeds in portraying Mary Wigman until shortly before the end, but then a pathetic and tearful tone creeps in, which tends to weaken the role. Stroux and von Mühlen do an excellent job in alternating roles.
The evening is irresistibly captivating until the break – not least because of the wonderfully told story of Alexander von Swaine, who fled to the Dutch East Indies as a gay dancer, was arrested there after the Germans invaded the Netherlands in 1940 and continued until after Detained in internment camps at the end of the war. Until his death in 1990, he was considered to have a criminal record in the Federal Republic of Germany – convicted as a gay man under Paragraph 175 – which was only abolished in 1974. Swaine was only rehabilitated in 2002, twelve years after his death. After the break, we continue with a strong winter image that reveals not only the outer but also the inner cold of the Nazi era. Neumeier then uses the image of a court case involving Mary Wigman to make clear the difficulty of assessing from today’s perspective how many victims and how many perpetrators were in those who tried to continue in Germany.
A strenuous pedagogical ending spoils the overall impression
After that it gets tiring. In an enlightened effort to extend the arc to our days, Neumeier uses Bob Dylan’s “With God on our Side” and even Freddy Mercury’s Bohemian Rhapsody for “Mary’s Farewell 1973”, which unfortunately is not mandatory, so that the An evening that captivated over two-thirds of the audience with strong art, ended in pedagogical efforts and thus somehow babbled on. At the end, the names of the 268 “invisible” victims of the Nazi era who have been researched are read out individually by the young up-and-coming dancers. So the evening ends for the audience, which cannot associate anything with most of the names – as commendable as the result of the research is – with the rather strenuous sitting out of a lengthy commemoration event in the dark. The names of the victims are also made visible in the foyer of the Ernst Deutsch Theater, in white letters on a black wall that divides the room into two areas.