There’s something stifling about the couplings in Mauro Bigonzetti’s Einssein, a live-streamed world premiere from Stuttgart Ballet. It’s the way their hands grab each other’s shoulders, arms latticed like a reef knot. Or the way one woman is clasped around a man’s neck, while her high-lifted leg presses against the side of his face. Or it’s a knee hooked firmly over a shoulder, or a man held in a sort of headlock between a woman’s ankles. The men are even wearing corsets, just to underline the sense of constriction.
The title Einssein means “oneness” or “to be one”, but this doesn’t look like a comfortable kind of unity. Are they trapped against their will, or is this merely the sometimes suffocating tangle of needs and desires in any close relationship? That’s open to interpretation.
Elsewhere in Bigonzetti’s world, couples and groups turn harmonious, playful, sultry, quirky, but none of that has the impact or intrigue of these repressive poses. The Stuttgart dancers are sharp, strong and streamlined. Women’s legs fly as if their feet are trying to get as far away from their bodies as possible. And there’s a brief, standout solo from Friedemann Vogel, breaking free with elastic expressivity.
Danced to three Beethoven piano sonatas, played live on stage by Andrej Jussow, the piano not only provides the soundtrack, but also a prop for the dancers to gather round, or dance on top of. It’s at the centre of the work, and yet the choreography doesn’t feel hugely musical, its clipped rhythms often moving to a metronomic pulse rather than breathing with Jussow’s playing. The movement doesn’t always follow the music’s shifts in tone, melody or dynamics.
Beethoven is not considered the most danceable of composers, and Bigonzetti’s piece might give that theory some credence if it weren’t for the other ballets in this all-Beethoven bill, two classic works from the 1970s by Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen. Adagio Hammerklavier is a lucid piece of exquisitely controlled emotions and exquisitely controlled limbs, and Grosse Fuge brings unexpected accents to a challenging score. Van Manen partners the music on equal terms, rather than in a slightly dysfunctional relationship.
