“We gather here tonight not only to celebrate dance, but to celebrate a visionary,” said H. E. David Červenka, the Czech Ambassador to Norway. He stood in the sun-drenched foyer of the iconic Oslo Opera House beside the sparkling Ingrid Lorentzen, artistic director of the Norwegian National Ballet, at the opening reception for Wings of Time, the most comprehensive collection of work by the world-renowned Czech choreographer and multimedia artist Jiří Kylián ever presented. “Culture is often used to build bridges,” Červenka said. “Jiří Kylián is the bridge.”
Kylián, 78 years old and dapper and unassuming in a black leather jacket and jeans, hesitantly joined them on the platform. “I wasn’t going to speak,” he said. “This is a very unique experience for me. I’m very humbled and a happy boy.”
Later, Lorentzen—a former principal dancer with the ballet—said to Kylián, “You’re not going to like this word, but when I first met you, I felt I was in the presence of a god.” He just shook his head and laughed. Later still, the Opera House’s Norwegian architect and co-founder of Snøhetta, Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, complimented the festival’s use of the entire iceberg-shaped building, from its slanted glass façade to its walkable roof to its three theaters and backstage. “What is life about? It’s about where my body is. At all times,” he said. “Your pieces are continually related to space.” Kylián responded, “Everything is about time and space. Time never stops, and space never stops.”
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These conversations happened days apart, but they all took place in the Opera House’s bright oak-walled foyer and have melded together in my recollections. Time did a funny thing during my three days at the festival in Oslo, bending in on itself before ceasing to matter. At the opening reception on May 29, Kylián ended his speech to the hundreds of international audience members by saying, “In this troubled world, to be able to do something like what we are doing here is remarkable. Extraordinary. And we deserve it. We deserve some kind of spirituality. We deserve culture. We deserve these things, so enjoy this moment. It’s now. Enjoy it.”
Wings of Time is extraordinary in its breadth and its execution. It celebrates Kylián’s impressive artistic legacy by presenting seven of his greatest ballets alongside his films, sculptures, photographs and installations.
Kylián was born and raised in Prague, Czechoslovakia. His mother, a dance prodigy, instilled in him a love of movement and music and took him to see his first ballet when he was nine years old. He began studying dance at the Prague Conservatory and then at the Royal Ballet School in London, where he met John Cranko, who invited him to join the Stuttgart Ballet. He soon began choreographing his own ballets to great acclaim and was invited to be the artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theater, where he remained from 1975 to 1999 before leaving to focus on his artistic projects. He has created nearly 100 dance works over the course of his career.
So, why is this retrospective of a Czech-born, Netherlands-based artist being organized by the Norwegian National Ballet? Kylián has had a long and faithful relationship with the company. They have performed twenty-seven of his works over nearly 40 years, and when the Oslo Opera House opened in 2008, it was with his work Worlds Beyond. The Norwegian National Ballet has been, in a way, Kylián’s artistic home away from home.
The ballets
Seven of Kylián’s ballets (spanning 1978 to 2008) are presented as part of Wings of Time on the Main Stage in two programs: Day Before Tomorrow and Day After Yesterday. (I admit it took me a minute, but they both mean “now.”) Before each performance, the audience is invited to witness a flash mob of Norwegian students dancing an excerpt from Chapeau (2005) on the Opera House’s roof. With colorful, sparkly top hats and jazzy kicks set to Prince’s “The Work,” it’s the perfect apéritif before the hearty meal.
Day Before Tomorrow, which I saw at its premiere, consists of three of Kylián’s more recent works, each its own beautiful beast and more stunning than the last. In Wings of Wax (1997), a tree is suspended upside down at the center of the stage. Eight dancers move in a classical then disjointed style to Heinrich von Biber, John Cage, Philip Glass and Johann Sebastian Bach. They slow-motion fly-walk and flutter their feet, flocking with V arms before splitting into pairs. I thought of Icarus and Daedalus, of flying and falling, and as a dangling light rotated around the stage–the cycles of darkness and light. Gods and Dogs (2008) is starkly different. Set to Ludwig Van Beethoven’s “String Quartet No. 1 in F major” (interrupted by Dirk Haubrich’s electronic composition), the eight dancers use a more contemporary, grounded movement vocabulary to explore their animalistic and divine sides. Someone slither-crawls off the stage and reappears from beneath the back curtain. Another creeps over a lit candle. A video projection morphs from an amorphous white mass to a large dog, open-mouthed, running straight at us, and then a man is lit up like his body is made of stars. Bella Figura (1995), which closed the program, cuts up the space with curtains that close and open, rise and fall, to block out and zoom in on the dance in a way I’d never seen before.
The second program, Day After Yesterday, features four of Kylián’s earlier ballets, all set to live orchestra: Forgotten Land (1981), No More Play (1988), Petite Mort (1991) and Symphony of Psalms (1978). The ballets on this program are more traditional and collaborate with the music in a truly remarkable way. The movement seems to bring out the music while the music brings out the movement. Together, they are more than the sum of their parts, though their parts are themselves masterpieces too. In Petite Mort, a favorite when I saw it on May 31, six men dressed to appear undressed dance with their backs to us, swinging swords. They pose and preen to one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s piano concertos before grabbing six scantily clad women, who rush out and collapse as if they are dead or can’t wait to die before rising again. The pairs soon separate into duets, and this is where Kylián’s talent shines. He is a master at partnering, with a seemingly bottomless supply of emotionally honest, evocative choreography for two.
The films
It turns out Kylián is not only a master choreographer but also a brilliant filmmaker. Emotion Pictures, presented in the Opera House’s Stage 2, features four of his films. While classified as “dance films” (they are choreographed and have no dialogue), they are somehow different from any in that genre I have seen before. Kylián’s style harkens back to Czech surrealism and Ingmar Bergman’s existentialist cinema. They are dreamlike, absurd, occasionally humorous and sometimes harrowing.
All four of the films star Kylián’s wife and longtime muse Sabine Kupferberg, who is as talented an actress as she was a dancer and still very much the love of his life. (During a press tour, Kylián said, “She stood with me at the beginning of my career, we will probably end our careers together, and preferably die at the same exact moment.”) Two of the films, Between Entrance and Exit (2013) and Car-Men (2006), were made in collaboration with director Boris Paval Conen. These two are more narrative and character-driven. The first is a deeply psychological study of a couple’s all-consuming love and grief. The latter is a quirky retelling of Georges Bizet’s Carmen set in a desolate scrapyard. Schwarzfahrer (2014), set in a historic Prague tram from 1930, is a humorous glimpse at the perhaps imagined or remembered meeting of two passengers, and Scalamare (2017) is a visually striking exploration of a couple on the 40th anniversary of their honeymoon, set on the steps of the Monumento ai Caduti in Ancona, Italy.
When I attended the premiere of Emotion Pictures, the great Liv Ullmann was in attendance. During the post-show Q&A, she stood and said that watching these films had been one of the top art experiences of her life.
The installations
Along with being a master choreographer and brilliant filmmaker, Kylián is also an extraordinary visual artist.
Moving Still is a sculptural installation depicting eight of his dancers’ bodies (3D-printed at 138 percent) on the façade of the Opera House. The bodies appear to move through the glass wall, half on the outside and half in the foyer. “The flight between one kind of being and another kind of being,” Kylián said. “Between life and death.”
In the backstage space, Free Fall is an immersive photographic study of Kupferberg, set to music by Bach. “We are all more than one person,” Kylián said of this installation. “And we are all in a state of free fall, until one day we will land for sure.” From there, viewers can walk through Moving On, a purposely imperfect mirrored corridor. “In life, you think everything is straight, but it never is.” That path leads to Ensō, a large installation featuring sand and a rotating mirror, set to Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel.”
It was here, with Ensō, that the festival reached its climax for me. The installation encapsulated everything I’d experienced–Kylián’s use of beautiful music, his obsession with light and dark, with the cycles of time. The night before I left Oslo, I went back to view this piece alone. I stood there for a while, listening and looking down on the sandy Zen Buddhist symbol of everlasting life, watching the huge mirror reflect and turn, reflect and turn, and I knew I was seeing the work of an artist at the height of his abilities. I was understanding something about time and space and life and death that I’d never understood before. I was humbled and a happy girl.