Obsessions

Ballet evening in three parts

ADAGIO & SCHERZO
Choreography: Krzysztof Pastor
Music: Franz Schubert

RETURNING WAVES
Choreography: Emil Wesołowski
Music: Mieczysław Karłowicz 

MOVING ROOMS
Choreography: Krzysztof Pastor
Music: Alfred Schnittke
Henryk Mikołaj Górecki

Premiere: 29 March 2014

Living at a time when we are fed epic narratives, you can sometimes find yourself longing for a bagatelle, an etude, a portmanteau film, or a collection of short stories. Obsessions is a rare chance to see three of short ballets devised by two excellent choreographers, one representing the abstract and the other the narrative ballet idiom. Emil Wesołowski’s Returning Waves is a tale about the breakup of a romantic relationship, with all the changing moods and contradicting desires that entails: the attraction and the repulsion, one party wanting to get closer, the other wishing to break away. Wesołowski heard the story in the first symphonic poem of Mieczysław Karłowicz. Marked with recurring waves of grief following the death of the composer’s father and sister, the piece was the Karłowicz’s passage to maturity (which lasted five years only and was tragically cut short by a fatal skiing). In Moving Rooms, Krzysztof Pastor focuses on two kinds of obsession: compulsive repetitiveness of the music written by Alfred Schnittke and Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, two composers whose work, dominated by rhythm and pulse, bring to mind The Rite of Spring, and obsessive repetition of motifs. Pastor’s Adagio & Scherzo danced to fragments of Franz Schubert’s quintet is an example of pure, or abstract, not to say self-referential dance. By his own admission, Pastor was also inspired by the personal, often ‘obsessive’, relations existing between the dancers of his company. Those who remember Haneke’s The Piano Teacher will always associate Schubert with the pressure of perfection and sexuality.

Polish National Ballet
Recorded music