Not toeing the line... Photograph: Linda Nylind
The south-western German town of Ludwigshafen is this week hosting a choreography competition. The contest, organised by Juliane Roessler, director-choreographer of the Theater im Pfalzbau, is pointedly called No Ballet; its logo, a pointe shoe crossed out in red. Entrants are allowed to produce any sort of dance at all, as long as it's not in any way classical, or on pointe. "We are not... interested in the reproduction of old-fashioned ballet ideas and dance techniques," says Roessler firmly.
Well, fair enough, you might say. It's her competition, after all. But isn't this aggressively anti-ballet slant just a bit passé? What's Roessler's problem? Are the contemporary-v-classical wars really still being waged - if indeed war was ever declared.
These days, contemporary choreographers such as Mark Morris, William Forsythe, Angelin Preljocaj, Hans van Manen, Wayne McGregor and Michael Clark - the list is endless - all feel free to help themselves to the classical technique, just as topflight dancers move easily and productively between contemporary and classical companies. Ballet's an idiom to be drawn on, and just because it has a past, doesn't mean it shouldn't have a present or a future. Referencing the past, in fact, is a quintessential element of the post-modernism to which Roessler lays claim.
But there's another aspect to pro- and anti-ballet sentiment in Germany. The country used to have more classical companies than any in Europe, with every medium-sized town boasting at least a small opera-ballet. In the last decade, however, these companies have been steadily decimated, with the smaller ones closed down and the larger ones replaced with much smaller (and, vitally, much cheaper) contemporary tanztheater ensembles. In Berlin, where there used to be three dance companies, there's now only one. In Cologne, once home to the redoubtable Tanz Forum, there is now no significant dance presence at all.
So given that the battle against those "old-fashioned ballet ideas" has been won, and the once great German classical tradition is dying on its feet, perhaps Juliane Roessler might risk lowering her guard. She might even discover what less doctrinaire dance-makers have known for a long time: that the classical technique can be turned to startlingly subversive purposes. And that when you start banning ideas you risk looking, to say the least, a bit desperate.
