by Rudy Fuch (1942-2022)
At the presentation of the Prize of Criticism of the Circle of Dutch Theater Critics to Jirí Kylián on Friday, September 6, 1991, at the Royal Theater Theatre
To begin with a well-known historical figure: of course I am not the one who should stand and speak here.
A laudatio on the work and art of Jirí Kylián should be spoken by someone who knows a lot about ballet and dance, an expert – one of the critics who chose him, the choreographer and dance master, chosen for this award – or else a colleague who, from a deep understanding of the intellectual and physical problems of the profession, could tell us exactly how good the award winner is – a colleague who has experienced Jirí Kylián up close and has seen how in the studio, with the dancers and dancers and also with the music, a ballet is put together and slowly takes shape. I belong to neither the first nor the second category. I have only seen a few ballets by Jirí Kylián: but when I saw them, after only a few minutes I did find myself watching with my mouth open. I really noticed that I was affected, or rather entranced – which, when someone had managed to enthroned me to the theater, I had not expected at all. When I was still in school, there was a government organization that organized theater performances for schools. Usually it was drama or music. In the bare auditorium of Schouwburg Katholiek Leven in Eindhoven, perhaps fifty school classes were assembled – and the artists had to compete with that noisy bunch. I still remember Albert and Ellen Vogel, who were declamating Couperus, being brought to despair by our horrible behavior, and another time, at a concert by the Brabant Orchestra, the conductor Hein Jordans, a small but fearsome figure, tapped out in the middle of the symphony, only to turn around and scold us terribly. Those were great moments. In that series of cultural events for the youth – nothing was spared us – there was also a ballet performance.
I don’t remember any of that because, apart from the slender legs of the ballerina, I was especially mesmerized by a boy diagonally in front of me a famous ringer, who with a rubber band between thumb on index finger tried to shoot a wad against those legs. Maybe I was ashamed of that even then; only later did I realize what artists and performers endure – on the part of the audience and sometimes on the part of the critics.
That was my first experience of ballet. It made little impression partly because, as an ordinary Dutch boy of Protestant Christian origin, I also thought dancing was just an artificial and effeminate art. Much later I saw some more ballets as part of the evening program at conferences and excursions – all coincidentally in the former Eastern Bloc. Drama did not go there, because of the language, and a ballet is colorful and moving and thus less boring than a concert. Once at the movingly beautiful opera in Budapest and once at the Kirov Theater in St. Petersburg, which, like the city, may soon be renamed as well. They were strongly narrative ballets, dancing briskly and steadily, in classical and traditional choreography.
Despite, or perhaps because of all this, Jirí Kylián’s ballets that I have seen, such as “Symphony of Psalms” and “Tanz-schule,” I was extraordinarily captivated – by that strangely moving labyrinth, by the beautifully switched and measured movements, the song of the limbs, by the solid architecture in which the precision and mastery of artistic thought was apparent, by the clarity of the course. It was as if the fantasy itself had gained limbs. In any case, Arlette van Boven told us that it was ballet that made you feel good as a dancer.
From my background, in visual art, I tend to see everything as a motionless image, an image in between movements, or an image in which movement is implied without being there. It is, of course, wrong to look at dance that way. This became especially clear in a chance meeting, two weeks ago in a hotel bar in Stuttgart, with Hans van Manen and the young German painter Günther Förg. We were talking about movements, especially fast and slow and even standing still which, I understood, in dance is of course also a movement – and perhaps the most important movement: the moment when other movements are connected and in that sense a rhythmic link of great choreographic significance. Whether it was because of the fire of the conversation or also because of the consumption of alcohol, Günther Förg suddenly wanted to make a ballet too, his paintings also have a rhythm, and he immediately and fervently began to describe his ballet.
He wanted to collaborate with the choreographer, sometimes painters, like architects tend to interfere with all other arts – but whatever Förg described, it was always an image, then for a moment nothing, and then know a slightly different image – and so on. And it is that momentary nothingness, I have seen in the ballets of Jirí Kylián, in which is the essence of ballet and that magic of the mesmerizing, continuous movement in which, although images also arise, they are always actually an image in transformation.
A painting has one structure – within it is a dazzling and mysterious complex of details and refinements that the eye scans in its own way. Perhaps a ballet has far fewer details as an image, it is pure structure, especially in the fashionable dance, which transforms itself undulating and moving – with accelerations, decelerations, figures of movement, leaps and tumblings, since Nijinsky everything is allowed I have understood – and it is that movement that literally drags us along, from the motionlessness of the beginning to the motionlessness at the end. The details are not so much the gestures within the movement but are the choreographic transformations of the movements themselves.
There are fairy-tale stories in which the child goes to sleep at night – and in the dark all the dolls and objects in the bedroom come to life, shone on by the moonlight. It is that moment, when the initially motionless dolls suddenly start moving breathlessly, that perhaps fascinates me most in ballets – it is in that moment that reality turns into a fairy tale and we, as spectators, are transformed into another time.
It is also that fantastic moment of truly coming to life that painters and sculptors, it was clear from the conversation with Günther Förg, so envy ballet, and theater in general. Sometimes that envy is so strong that visual artists, when asked for a collaboration, tend to try to suppress that typical theatrical quality. Several years ago, another German painter, Anselm Kiefer, was invited to collaborate on the mise-en-scène, for the Frankfurt Opera, of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” In the picture he imagined, again the picture, there was no room for movements of singers. In Kiefer’s conception, the singers had to remain motionless side by side at all times and deliver the text like an oratorio. Needless to say, this exceptional performance did not materialize. The opera went its own traditional way. Yet, in my opinion, such attempts at dramatic and radical cooperation between the arts should not be abandoned. I also know that in the twentieth century it was necessary for every art to develop almost sectarianly and in its own specific space in order to achieve a radical clarification of its own language.
At one point, the split of minds was almost universal. At the beginning of the century, visual artists such as Picasso, Larinov and Chagall still designed sets and costumes for the ballet.
Such collaborations, even as far as dance is concerned, still occur – even though, I believe, Balanchine began to place ziin choreographies on the bare stage, a sparse aesthetic that has found quite a following. The sculptors Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd have collaborated, in defining the stage image with, I believe, Lucinda Childs and Thrishz Brown, and the painter David Salle has created designs for ballets by Karol Armitage. But in almost all cases such collaborations have a decorative character, just as, and this is a twentieth century tragedy, visual art when it steps outside the protective walls of the museum is almost always decorative. And when it is not, when it displays a certain dramatic self-consciousness such as Jannis Kounellis’s design for the square in front of the new House of Representatives the other day, it meets insurmountable objections.
However, in spite of the curious misunderstanding between Hans van Manen and Günther Förg, which as always was about the own character and the own rights of each art, in spite of these territorial disputes, I think that after all, precisely dance, by its very nature, has that openness and flexibility to seek intense cooperation. Especially in the work of Jirí Kylián, in what I have seen then, I detect a special openness, a joy in experimentation but also a pleasant lack of dance orthodoxy and even a joy in beauty.
On the other hand, I know, many visual artists envy the magic of dance that brings silence to life. This is true of contemporary artists, for example Peter Struycken (who, by the way, once collaborated on a ballet but I don’t remember where and how). However, it is a desire that, at least since the Renaissance, has helped dominate art. Not long ago, I stood for the first time before the overwhelmingly beautiful altar by the woodcarver Veit Stoss at the Marian Church in Krakow. Life-size figures in brilliant and excitingly pleated poses in shallow cabinet, a shallow stage.
The art historian Michael Baxandall has once compared the complex texture of posture and gesture, of the lacy drawing of folds resembling calligraphy, and with which the artist attempts to breathe and animate the motionlessness of the figures, to musical figures and patterns used at that time, the fifteenth century, especially in Germany by the “Meistersänger” in their competitions. The word for these particular embellishments within the larger, structural form is Fioritur which Baxandall translates as “flourish” – in Dutch something like sway. Standing before that indescribably radiant altar, a principal work of Central European art that has its own beauty, I was as carried away as I was when I saw a ballet by another Central European, Jirí Kylián. Perhaps I am just imagining it, but in ziin’s work, too, I find something of that Fioritur, of that cautious and controlled ornamentation within the great, moving form worked through it almost like embroidery. And I hope that, with his background of Baroque and Gothic and Jugendstil, styles that did not shy away from ornament, he can be the one to try a collaboration with great contemporary artists of his talent and level, not just decorators but as true partners in image and movement. This is necessary, this cross-fertilization, because otherwise every art, even art in its isolation, will reach a state of great, complacent ameach.
Several years ago I became involved in an Italian theater group in which, in addition to a director, musicians, visual artists, magicians and acrobats, dancers also participated. That was the only time I experienced dancers up close. I was then impressed not only by the extraordinary physical gravity of the profession but also by the almost mysterious togetherness between dancers in the group. Of course there are arguments and envy, but unlike a painter or writer who have to work alone, a dance group is a collective. If one dancer doesn’t handle well, the dancer falls to the ground. In that group, the choreographer is the determiner of the patterns and of the Fioritur which, however, must be performed by the dancers, sometimes not without pain. So I think it is right to assume here that the award for Jirí Kylián is also an award for the Nederlands Dans Theater to which he has been associated for so long.
I have talked about what a visual artist envies dance: the mesmerizing transition from stillness to movement. But there is something else, something much more naïve. At a symposium on visual art and theater, one of those events that rarely really delivers, someone asked the painter Markus Lüpertz what interested him so much about working with the theater. Lüpertz grinned, and said very eminently: the applause. I also sometimes, he said, want to come on stage after the performance, bow, and then hear the audience clap, preferably for a long time.
But tonight Jiri Kylian, the honor and applause is yours alone.