Ballet National de Marseille & ICK Amsterdam: Appearance | Disappearance

The creative duo leading the Marseille ballet ensemble and ICK Amsterdam, Emio Greco and Pieter C. Sholten, are touring Ljubljana after a two-year hiatus. And returning in grand style!

Kindertotenlieder – a duo of thematically linked and coherent projects, created over the last three years – will be presented as a double-bill exclusively in Ljubljana!

Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), poems written by Friedrich Rückert (in an outpouring of grief following the death of two of his children), were set to music as a song cycle by Gustav Mahler. Appearance addresses the issues of youth, youthful naivety, the brevity and transience of childhood, conducting its exploration with great originality – combining a professional dance ensemble, video images and live music accompaniment with a children’s choir. The young singers – their pure voices underlining the fragility of childhood – share the stage with pianist Franck Krawczyk, who has recomposed Mahler’s original score, whilst the evanescence of youth and initiation into the harsh and unforgiving world of adulthood are embodied in the Marseille corps de ballet’s superb vocabulary of movement.

Whilst Appearance centres on the brief prelude to life, the experiences restricted exclusively to childhood, and then existing as memory, relived or recalled only mentally, Disappearance deals with impermanence, with mortality. The voices that radiated life in Appearance, are now emerging merely as remembrances, as pictures – images of things past, and reminiscences. Although bodies are still here, adult, mature, strong, they are already marked by signs of aging, decay, loss of naivety and intuition. And it is this process that focuses on reviving memories, which can be perpetually preserved by means of advanced technology – projection –, and on spotlighting the real-life bodies of twenty consummately skilled dancers struggling to keep alive images and searching for irrevocably lost time.