Two icons of the New York avant-garde of the 1950s meet a world premiere by Martin Schläpfer: with Divertimento No. 15, George Balanchine choreographed a fragrant neoclassical Mozart ballet and Merce Cunningham too has not lost touch with the skies in his bouncy dance piece Summerspace. In contrast, Martin Schläpfer will create a new work for the dancers of the Vienna State Ballet based on a highly dramatic symphony: Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique”, characterised by emotional highs and deep abysses.

“I try to find interesting proportions of movement in time and space because music is time. It’s not the melody that counts, it is the time it gives you”, George Balanchine once said about his choreographic work. Divertimento No. 15 from 1956 is one of the few ballets he created to a work by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Born entirely out of the music – Mozart’s Divertimento in B flat major KV 287 – it perfectly captures the spirit of the divertissement, originally created as entertainment. Its chamber music character is matched by a select cast consisting of five female soloists, three male soloists and a corps de ballet of eight female dancers for a choreography in which Balanchine skilfully and subtly inscribes a complex array of geometric patterns within the space while allowing his dances to unfold in their individual variations with great power, remarkable verve and unique character. 

Following the premiere of his Duets in June 2022 at the Vienna Volksoper, Summerspace is another work by Merce Cunningham to join the repertoire, marking the first time that one of the American’s pieces will be performed by the Vienna State Ballet at the Staatsoper. No other choreographer has challenged collective assumptions about the art of dance as radically as Cunningham with his abandonment of the connections between movement, music and stage and costume design, his development of a dance technique that establishes new links between different parts of the body and his rejection of traditional ideas of the theatre space. In Summerspace six dancers appear to pass through the space like birds in the detached atmosphere of a balmy summer day. “It was about space, as the title indicates”, Cunningham explained. “I decided to number the entrances and exits (...) and to link them by all the possible trajectories.” This yielded 21 possibilities, for which he defined different forms of movement and whose running order and tempo were fixed according to random principles of aleatoric. He persuaded two outstanding contemporary artists to design the decor and provide the music: Robert Rauschenberg, whose 100^th birthday will be celebrated in 2025, created a pointillist “landscape of blossoms”, while Morton Feldman composed an atmospheric piece of music for two pianos. 

To round off the programme, Martin Schläpfer presents his world premiere Pathétique. He once again plunges into creative work with the dancers of the Vienna State Ballet to the sound of Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B minor op. 74: “Tchaikovsky’s Sixth washes around us like water in which we are sinking, though not painfully – it is like a release, and then it rises up again, full of virtuosity, brilliant tempi, a broad spectrum of dynamics and a fascinating wealth of melody”, Martin Schläpfer comments on the score. “It is a symphony like a novel and, despite everything that has been read into it, an enigma. For me, it forms the starting point and the basis of my new ballet.” 

What happened in dance in New York during the 1950s can be seen as one of the most inspiring periods in dance history, which continues to guide us even now. On one side there was George Balanchine, the founder of New York City Ballet and an artist who personified the links between the old tradition of Czarist Russia with a neoclassicism of his own that was shaping ballet in America and had revolutionised the whole genre by extending the vocabulary of danse d’école, understanding dance as a form of music making using the body in space, and body images based on athleticism. On the other side were the many forms of modern dance, manifest in such varied approaches as those of Martha Graham, Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham – to name just three of its exponents. With George Balanchine’s Divertimento No. 15 and Merce Cunningham’s Summerspace, the Vienna State Ballet’s premiere of Pathétique invites you to immerse yourself in this fascinating time and let yourself be enchanted by these two contrasting approaches. In addition, the programme also connects to the present with the world premiere of Pathétique, with which Martin Schläpfer will complete his work as a choreographer for the Vienna State Ballet in his term as Artistic Director.

For art lovers, the premiere presents a special highlight: the stage and costume design for Cunningham’s Summerspace was created by Robert Rauschenberg, who is regarded as a pioneer of American Pop Art, but whose affinity with the performing arts also made him a close partner of Cunningham and John Cage, among others. In 2025, the world will celebrate the artist’s centenary.