With the piece Overgrown Path, choreographer Jiří Kylián embarked on a new path. It is the first ballet he created where the choreography was not exclusively based on the music but, in addition, on the circumstances that lead to the music’s creation. Inspired by Janácek’s intimate piano suite from the years around 1902, the darkest time in the composer’s life, there are movements in Overgrown Path that depart from the musical structure to seemingly align with the underlying emotional tone.
At nearly fifty, Janácek’s beloved daughter Olga died. Herself only twenty one at the time, she had suffered a protracted period of illness. In addition, a few years earlier, his son Vladimir had been abducted. Olga’s death left tangible traces in all of Janácek’s works from around the turn of the century, especially the opera Jenufa, the small cantata Elegy on the Death of Daughter Olga and the piano suite The Overgrown Path. The latter work consists of tenindependent pieces, some for harmonium, which were joined together into a piano suite.
A highly autobiographical piece of music, the composer seems to be looking back and reflecting on his own life. The suite resounds with memories. The musings, much like a walk along an overgrown path, act as memories entangled in the foliage of the time. The years have changed the meaning of life’s events, their value and emotional charge. Some events appear with sharper contours, others have lost their content altogether. Jiří Kylián expresses this in his choreography without attempting to depict a narrative of Janácek’s life. “The only autobiographical element is that I know Janácek’s homeland well,” says Jiří Kylián. (Like Janácek, Kylian was born and raised in Czechoslovakia / Czech Republic.)
The theme of Overgrown Path is life and death, two events that are prerequisites for one another. The work departs from the inexorable fact that life goes on when someone dies. The sorrow of death takes resounds in those closest to the departed. While in this inner orbit time stands still outside of it life carries on. This phenomenon can also be observed in less dramatic situations. For example, when engaged in discussion in a room where others are also involved in conversation, where those conversations might be about something as fundamental as life or death, it is nevertheless still your own words that seem most important. No matter how mundane they are.
“During the preparations, I had long discussions about the decor with Walter Nobbe,” says Jiří Kylián. “It was during the U.S. presidential election. And even though I knew how much was at stake in the election, still the scenography was the most important to me.”
This confluence between the private and the public is one of the cornerstones of Overgrown Path. “The given scene that the audience sees is just part of a much larger whole,” says Jiří Kylián, “what takes place on stage can not be separated from what is happening in the world outside. Therefore, the stage is occasionally filled with groups of dancers who act as messengers from other parts of the world. They bring their movements from this outside world and, subsequently, do not follow the musical logic internal to the piece. At the end of the piece a girl dies in the middle of the stage. The others continue to dance optimistically. Someone is gone. And so now then? It is not as cruel as it seems. That’s the way life is. I’ve experienced that myself. “
The eleventh and final scene is danced without audible music but it is based on Jenufa, Janácek’s opera contemporaneous to the piano suite. It can be assumed that he must also have had Jenufa in mind while working on the piano music. In Overgrown Path this interplay is woven precisely by the opera’s music being expressed only in the dancers’ movements, and notheard as such. It was important for Kylián to stitch the eleven scenes together into a unified whole, this being one reason why the dancers remain on stage between each piece of music.
“This ballet is extremely important to me,” says Kylián. “I will work with it for years until it becomes perfect. For me, this is the first time the premiere is not the most important thing.”
Overgrown Path is dedicated to Antony Tudor who, according to Kylián, is “one of the greatest choreographers of our time”. The two artists grew to have a special relationship after Tudor saw some of Kylián’s ballets in New York. “I had only seen a few of Tudor’s works,” says Jiří Kylián. “We met after one of our shows in New York and he was ecstatic. He said that I carried on his style and that I did things that he had always dreamed of doing. He has also worked a lot with Czech music and is in general strongly influenced by Czech culture, which is my background. His recognition made an extremely strong impression on me. It will give me strength in difficult times. “
Overgrown Path premiered with Nederlands Dans Theater in 1980.