Archives: Archived Performances

Lekvattnet är en av de koreografier som Birgit Cullberg skapade under Cullbergbalettens första år, 1967. Lekvattnet är ett ortnamn, men det är också ett ord som suggererar fram bilden av vatten med skimrande fiskar i lektid. Förhållandet mellan man och kvinna är ständigt återkommande i Cullbergs verk, i Lekvattnet kanske tydligare än i något annat verk. Baletten ansågs vara det mest erotiska verk på Cullbergs repertoar. Projektionerna i verket föreställde spermier enligt Cullberg själv och var ett exempel på hur självklar relationen mellan sexualitet och dans var för henne. Parningslek är också grundmotivet i baletten. Rörelserna är inspirerade av olika varelser som fågel och fisk och slutligen man och kvinna, alla av två kön som söker varandra och förenas. Dekorens rörliga projektioner understryker känslan av rymd och det som växer. Lekvattnet ansågs också vara Birgit Cullbergs mest abstrakta verk och ett väl sammansatt verk grundat i den amerikanska danstekniken.

Musiken i baletten Lekvattnet var avancerad elektronisk musik, något som Cullberg inte så ofta använde sig av.

American choreographer Alvin Ailey revolutionized dance in the 1970s by mixing classical ballet with rhythms and tones from the African-American dance tradition and experience. The Lark Ascending was originally created for 12 dancers of the American Dance Theater to music of the same name composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The theme of the lyrical, low-key ballet was love and affection, as well as an attempt to translate Scotland’s mysterious elegance into elegant dance. The choreography was based on Martha Graham’s spatial patterns and vocabulary. At its premiere in April 1972, The New York Times wrote:

“The Lark Ascending is that kind of ballet that is fuzzy around the edges, if one could find the edges.”

Singing till his heaven fills,
Tis love of earth that he instills
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes.”

(from Poems and Lyrics of the Joys of Earth)-Noel Goodwin

Throughout her life Birgit Cullberg was strongly opposed to tyranny in any form. Themes of violence, war, abuse of power, religion and moralism were often present in her ballets and deployed overall in her work as a form of protest. Revolt (1973) was a collective ballet where the protagonists were a group of prisoners. Their revolt against violence and oppression was the theme.

Revolt is inspired by the Italian artist Giambattista Piranese’s artwork Carceri d’invenzione (1760-1762) which was included in an exhibition about Italian prisons that took place in Stockholm at the time. Although the ballet was about revolt against authority, Cullberg said that it was more about the dream of freedom and of resistance to violence in all its forms. The protest thus took on a positive air, depicting an overarching desire for freedom and sense that life goes on. Cullberg was by and large an optimistic, life affirming and positive person. In Revolt, the prisoners found a way out to freedom. One of the main characters was Judith who sacrifices her body, seducing the prison guard and then killing him. Towards the end of the 1970s Cullberg’s work became more overtly political, moving away from erotic depictions of love that had characterized her aesthetic for some time. Revolt is one of Cullberg’s abstract and dramatic dance theater works alongside others such as Eurydice is Dead, Romeo and Juliet and The Dreamer.

Revolt was first performed as a ballet for television (1972) and was later moved to the stage. Judith was danced by Lena Wennergren and the prison guard by Vlado Juras.

Red Wine In Green Glass was first created as a pas de deux for television and for the stage and was later incorporated into Birgit Cullberg’s first full evening ballet titled Bellman (1971). It is a pastorale about Carl Michael Bellman and Ulla Vinblad. Cullberg was inspired by Bellman’s ability to lift up the poor and destitute in his poetry. In an interview with Svenska Dagbladet before the premiere, Cullberg said: “I love his humor and his tenderness towards downtrodden people, especially in his portrayal of women.” (Erik Näslund, Birgit Cullberg, p. 254). It was an attempt to create in terms of movement what Bellman was doing with his poetry. In the pas de deux The red wine in green glasses, Bellman’s erotic intoxication is depicted together with his beloved (illusion) Ulla Winbladh.

As a full length ballet Bellman was considered by many to be Birgit Cullberg’s least successful work. It was integrated duet Red Wine In Green Glass that stood for the high point of Bellman. “The erotic intoxication that flowed there was of a genuine Cullberg signature.” (Erik Näslund, Birgit Cullberg, p. 255) In the television version of the pas de deux, there are clear references to sexual positions, a device that Cullberg used in other works as well.

The TV version of Red Wine In Green Glass was made with the chroma key technology (also known as green screen). This meant that the background images were taken with one camera and images of the dancers with another. When you combined the images, it created the effect that the dancers were floating on top of or inside an image or environment. Cullberg was one of the first choreographers to extensively use technology for aesthetic purposes and throughout her career she was positive about the potential of technology in art. In Red Wine In Green Glass, inspired by Bellman, Cullberg use paintings by Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and William Turner that suited the pastorale well. Music was by Beethoven.

Niklas Ek danced Bellman and Mona Elgh the role of Ulla Winbladh. The ballet was a great success and Cullberg was awarded several prizes, including the Prix Italia.

The Dreamer is one of Birgit Cullberg’s psychological and realist dance works. The ballet is based on Eugene O’Neill’s drama A Touch of the Poet that had its posthumous premiere at The Royal Dramatic Theater (Dramaten) in Stockholm in 1957. The Dreamer was first created on commission for a television company in Wisconsin, USA, using chroma key technology (also known as green screen). The work then premiered later that same year for Cullberg Ballet.

The goal was to create a ballet based on a work by O’Neill, but this came with its own set of difficulties. Until that time, no dance works had been created based on O’Neill’s texts. One explanation for this was that, while O’Neill was extremely deft with words, very little tended to happen of a scenic nature, thus rendering a point of departure for a movement based work challenging.

In A Touch of the Poet, Cullberg found a topic that interested her a great deal, namely that all people dream of success. Conversely however, when their dreams do not materialize, they flee into fantasy worlds. The protagonist of The Dreamer is former Major Con Melody. When, after shooting a count, he is stripped of his medals and thereby entrance to the fine upper-class world, he finds himself impoverished and destitute. His wife and daughter are charged with his care, as he descends into a deeper and more fantastical fantasy life to escape his situation.

The Dreamer premiered at the Royal Theater in Copenhagen on the 18th of February 1975. Dancer Bruce Marks performed in the lead role. The title in Denmark was The War Hero. When The Dreamer later premiered with the Cullberg Ballet at the Concert Hall in Stockholm, the work had been

Kalfaktorn / The Officer’s Servant is Mats Ek’s first work for The Cullberg Ballet and had its premiere in Falun in 1976. The piece, based on Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, depicts how a poor soldier seeks revenge after his wife betrays him with a young junior officer. Enraged, humiliated and subjugated, Woyzeck stabs his wife to death. While his act may be seen as a form of social or class protest, it ultimately harms the person most dear to him and not the object of his rage, the officer.

Birgit Cullberg’s The School For Wives (Hustruskolan) is a comedic ballet based freely on Molières The School For Wives (1662). The work centers around the middle-aged bourgeois man Arnolphe and a young loving couple, Agnes and Horace. Arnolphe has raised Agnes in isolation in hopes of marrying her when she comes of age. He regards her as a simple and foolish young woman, unable to grasp the complexities of the world, and attempts to keep it that way in order that she marry and remain faithful to him.

But Agnes, strengthened by her new found love for Horace and her will to live, outsmarts her guardian and continues to meet Horace. A number of twists ensue, including two cases of mistaken identity. Finally, through a final plot turn, Arnolphe’s schemes are rendered ineffective and young Agnes continues her relationship with Horace.

As in a much of Cullberg’s work, a central theme of the ballet revolves around an old man’s vain attempt to win a young girl’s heart. Furthermore, themes of loneliness and longing for unattainable love are present in the work. Additionally, a complicating factor in the work is that Arnolphe is truly in love with Agnes, shading the humorous elements with more complexity and lending the comedic a human, if not tragic, touch. The School For Wives is an example of Cullberg’s ability to deploy humor with subtlety and grace.

The School For Wives was first recorded for television in the United States by the same production company at the University of Wisconsin that also filmed The Dreamer. The School For Wives was moved to the stage in 1974.

As the title suggests, Lar Lubovitch’s Poem to Joy is an ode to joy in its various forms. The first five cello movements, whose music is based on folk and court dances, focus on external joys: play, celebration, Eros, and of course dance. The sixth and last movement focuses on inner joy and harmony, a state of contentment that humanity has longed for since time eternal.

Giuseppe Carbone became Birgit Cullberg’s assistant in 1976.After setting this ballet, Carbone went on to create some additional pieces for the company.

Premiering on November 13, 1976 Rapport was Birgit Cullberg’s first large scale ensemble ballet created expressly for the stage after many years during which she created first for television, to then rework and transfer the pieces to the stage. Set to music by Allan Petterson, who would become a central driving force behind the ballet, Rapport was a unique collaboration between the Royal Opera House and the Cullberg Ballet.

Rapport, like Eurydice is Dead, Revolt, The Dreamer and Romeo and Juliet, belongs to the part of Cullberg’s canon considered as abstract and dramatic dance theater works. Rapport is still regarded as one of the most important choreographic works in Swedish dance history.

It is a political ballet where the stage transforms into a forum for a political discussion between polarities: rich and poor, oppressors and oppressed, executioners and victims. The stage design consisted of a white circular carpet which represented not only the earth, but also a universal problem as well as the eternal cycle of life. Situated in the center is the poet, originally danced by Niklas Ek. He symbolizes a unifying force, one that with his art can transcend difficulties and contradictions. As the poet is dying he has a vision in which he sees a way out of the darkness and into the light. While Rapport depicted the trials of the personal and individual, it also placed the future of the entire human race at play, one unfolding all over the world in the shadow of war.

Inspired by French author and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (Huit Clos), Maurice Béjart’s Sonate à Trois tells the tragic story of three people who are locked in a room and can not get out. It is not by chance that they were brought together, as death has condemned them to a common hell. The work is danced by a man and two women.

Sonate à Trois premiered in Essen, Germany on May 4, 1957. The piece was danced by Cullberg Ballet 20 years later.

In Guiseppe Carbone’s Personnr. 7852 (7852 My Name) the number symbolizes the human name that is entered into a computer mainframe for purposes of residency and citizenship. Further, the work evinces the human drama unfolding in the industrialized world where an individual’s personality is crushed by everyday mechanical labor. In this capacity, human values have ceased to exist and with them real human contact. Relationships between men and women becomes are drowned in daily routine resulting in indifference.The male protagonist rebels against the drudgery of his mechanized circumstances by discovering in his imagination a different world, a free and ideal one. He reaches out for human contact from this new found place but is ignored by the society he lives in, becomes lonely and retreats into the refuge of his imagination. Along and struggling to adapt the man cannot, even after several attempts, free himself from the invisible chains that bind him to the mechanical system surrounding him. In desperation he considers suicide.

In the end, his ideal world helps him to adapt and he manages to find a new place for himself. For a brief moment, he manages to live fully in this dream world. When his dream inevitably dissolves, he becomes once again the mechanical man. The man’s dream could be considered a quest, a means to defeat the loneliness and isolation of the industrialized world.

In Bejart’s version of this classic story, The Firebird is not only the phoenix resurrected from its ashes, but also the poet and the revolutionary as well. The ballet depicts a group of partisans expressing their revolutionary ideas, with strong cohesion and fervent loyalty. One of them is the firebird, spurring on the others with his unwavering faith and passion. Revolutions can be crushed, but they again rise from the ashes like the phoenix.

While the cast as a whole is mixed, in previous iterations of The Firebird the main role was danced by a woman, whereas Béjart cast a man in the role.

Aunt Elsa’s Secret Dreams (Tant Elsas Hemliga Drömmar) never made it to its premiere. Birgit Cullberg scrapped the work after the general rehearsal.  However, she described the idea for the work as follows:

“After a few visits to churches with other single pensioners, I have made this ballet partly as a proposal for a more entertaining Mass and partly as an attempt at a critical examination of the church tradition itself. What do we mean by communion, sin, heaven? Are they not just theatrical templates that are often, like the Eucharist, based on ancient, cannibalistic and sacrificial rituals? Love of mankind is essential and not the often sadistic love of Jesus on the cross. Jesus was an intelligent and unconventional man who, if he had lived now, surely would have adapted their message to our current cultural and political developments.”

The work centers around the theme of memory in so far as they are sometimes strong enough to be able to kill.

Sequenza III was an ironic pas de deux about domestic cohabitation.

Commissioned for the Cullberg Ballet, and choreographed by Micha van Hoecke.

The American dancer and choreographer Miguel Godreau danced in the Cullberg Ballet for a period in the early 1970s. He became renowned as a dancer in the Alvin Ailey Company where he was active from the mid-1960s.

The inspiration for the work Freedom came from a quote by Albert Einstein: “Peace is not achieved by force – only through understanding.”

The piece depicts multiple generations of a family, shifting with each section of Vivaldi’s famous Four Seasons music from the newborn as spring, a young girl as summer, a father as autumn and a grandmother as winter.

The work was called The Four Seasons at the time of its premiere. It was later changed to The Four Ages in 1979.

A poetic dance about human relationships.

Seven Dancers explores the intersection between European and North American modes of classical and modern dance. Just as a clown may inwardly long to play Hamlet, so too might a modern trained dancer long to dance the traditional classical repertoire, or a classically trained dancer yearn to try something modern. The piece, which takes place in a dance studio before the start of a rehearsal, is neither earnest nor ironic. Rather, it is simply the dancers’ play with and juxtaposition of different forms and expressions of dance techniques.

“When we see an old person on the street staggering and crooked, we do not think that she or he contains within them a whole world, an entire lifetime.

Experiences, youth, power, love, work, rapture and disappointments – all this still lives within the elderly. Memories are not something dead and foreign, they are living matter and appear and become violently present when a loved one dies. Then the dead come alive again and everything you have experienced together becomes reality again, with an almost mysterious power.”

– Birgit Cullberg