FESTIVAL FOR CONTEMPORARY GERMAN CHOREOGRAPHY IN SPRING 2008

The "Festival for contemporary German choreography" took place from March 27 to April 24, 2008.

Events were held at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theatre and the School of Dramatic Art Theatre. Roland Berger Strategy Consultants sponsored this month of German dance as part of their "Counterparts" initiative in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut.

The festival began with the opening of the photography exhibition "Bettina Stöß: TanzPortraits". The project aimed to capture the German dance scene's multiplicity of personalities in a portrait documentation of, for example, Dominique Mercy, Polina Semionova and Sasha Waltz. Two seminars, called "dancin' germany" and "far away from the other side", were also held during the festival. They were presented by the German Dance Archives Cologne and the SK Stiftung Kultur.

The calendar of events included two guest productions from Germany. D'AVANT, a production by Berlin's Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, was presented by Sasha Waltz & Guests in a co‑production with Les Ballets C. de la B. (Ghent, Belgium), Festival de Marseille/Festivals le Carreau/Scène Nationale de Forbach and Théâtre de la Ville (Paris, France).

The other guest production was the ballet ROMEO AND JULIET, performed by the Deutsche Oper am Rhein from Düsseldorf. Youri Vamos set the Italian Renaissance story of Romeo and Juliet in the 1920s, the same time period in which Prokofiev composed the ballet. Two other ballets by Youri Vamos were the "Rite of Spring" by Stravinsky and "Erda" by Peteris Vasks. For the first, Vamos interpreted the pagan rite of spring as the spring awakening. The music of Latvian composer Peteris Vasks inspired Vamos to translate his ideas on fate into exceptionally impressive images.

One of the festival highlights was John Neumeier's award-winning adaptation of "The Seagull" on April 7. The Moscow premiere featured soloists from the Hamburg Ballet. The ballet was accompanied by music from Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky and Scriabin. John Neumeier, director, chief choreographer and ballet school director of the Hamburg Ballet, contributed not just the choreography, but also designed the sets, costumes and lighting. Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, the Goethe-Institut and the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theatre invited 250 notables from cultural centers, business and politics to the performance, followed by a reception at the opera. The festival's patron was Dr. Walter Jürgen Schmid, German ambassador to Moscow.