Perverted Traditions and Psychedelic Ecstasy
Johannes Birringer*
Ikonen. Choreographies by Angelin Preljocaj, Stijn Celis, & Diego Tortelli.
Staatstheater Saarbrücken, 31 October 2025.
At the end: standing ovations after the audience has rapturously received the long 45-minute dancework ICONIC: Pink Floyd with choreography by Diego Tortelli. In the beginning: a mildly annoying program leaflet handed out to us, in which the dramaturg tries to explain the meaning of the word “icon,” citing dictionary definitions from the Grosse Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. The first two works on the premiere program of the Staatstheater Saarbrücken Ballet (starting the season 2025-26) had little if any connection with the title anyway, and thus one may not need to worry about expanding the range of definitions. If “icon” once had a clear relationship to sacred art and painting, it surely can nowadays mean a lot more things in popular cultural usage.
Starting the evening with an older piece, Noces, first created by French-Albanian choreographer Angelin Preljocaj in 1989, was a clever move by the Saarbrücken company director Stijn Celis, since the music—Stravinsky’s dance cantata Les Noces—is certain to keep us on the edge of our seats from the very start. We watch a mysterious opening scene where several men in formal attire, white shirts and ties, are slumped on elegant benches looking rather downtrodden, while a female dancer (Sidney Ramsey), enters from stage left in a beautiful, embroidered blue dress. She slowly guides another young woman (Alva Inger Armenta, in a red dress) towards the center, carefully directing her path, touching her gently on knees and shoulder, since this young bride, we gather, with her right hand covering her eyes, does not want to see what lies ahead.
Stravinsky’s cantata was completed in 1923, written for four vocal soloists, chorus, percussion and four pianos; intended for the peasant wedding that Bronislava Nijinska choreographed for the original staging with the Ballets Russes. The short score used a libretto Stravinsky himself had written using Russian wedding lyrics; and we hear a stridently fragmentary and contrapuntal music, an atavistic world of shrill voices evoking the wilder side of a wedding feast that is to begin soon, a ceremony that will become a debacle of gender struggles, violent couplings and worse anticipations once the men join the scene.
First they roll on the floor, as if warming up for a competition; they also rearrange the five benches several times to alter the scenography, occasionally leaving them tilted upright, as if they were cranes overlooking the construction site of the battle of the sexes.
When Preljocaj brought his company to New York in 1991 (where I first saw Noces), the raw energy of the dancers was stunning. Rather than staying with the original Nijinska wedding, we saw a traumatizing event that implies the bride—and here all women represent her and are also doubled—walking into a consensual rape. The Saarbrücken company is superb too; very quickly duets and group choreographies ensue that gradually involve the “doubles”—five puppets dressed in wedding gowns. Two of them could be spotted from the beginning, leaning against the curtain near the back, somewhat ominously, and Preljocaj choreographs a full-out male-female confrontation in which both the men and the women fling the puppets into the air, smash them on the floor and toss them around, just as they themselves are tossed around in the frantic physicality of this dance, which accelerates and leaves them breathless. The concluding moments are painful to watch, as the puppet brides are hung up, one after the other, high on the benches, their veils distorted. A harsh and pitiless lynching.
Celis’s own new choreography, Alte Erde, placed right after this crescendo, could not have provided a better contrast. It is a tranquil, exquisite trio with three male dancers dressed in loose white jackets and short trousers (Marco Marangio, Flavio Quisisana, Shawn Throop), who are first seen lying on the floor, huddled together as if in a dream. Then they awake to the rousing voice of Malian Wassoulou singer Oumou Sangaré. Her song “Saa Magni” provides the gentle atmosphere for the trio’s intimate, earth-bound movements and soothing, careful gestures that evolve slowly, after a lengthy cloth is brought in, into a series of transformative uses of the fabric.
The brown and ochre-colored cloth, associating natural clay and earth pigments, becomes a prayer carpet, a dress, scarf, rope, burqa and protective coat, and gradually we realize its interrelationship with the large-scale video projection upstage. A sudden musical change to elegiac piano music by Philip Glass (“Les enfants terribles: Paul is dying,” arranged for two pianos) introduces the filmic captures by video artist Michael Koob of a painting by the local painter Till Neu.
During the remainder of the piece, we can watch the dancers in front of the looming immersispectacle of Neu’s golden-ochre painting “Altes Weltbild,” a landscape with occasional references to stars, the sun, Egyptian goddesses and ancient Greek Kourai. First the projected canvas moves slowly to the left, as if we were seeing a tapestry or Aztec mural glide past, then the camera begins to zoom in and show us details from the painting, distracting us sufficiently from the three dancers who often seem rooted to the ground, legs spread out wide, their arms gently swinging.
The choreography is rather understated, and the elegiac mood with its constant filmic “image vehicles” (Aby Warburg) tends to shift our attention to the visual remembrances of mythic pathos, eros and death. Warburg of course felt that Bilderfahrzeuge, for example in his famous Bilderatlas, are significant testimonies, tracing lines of continuity between antiquity and modernity, but Celis’ grasp of such migration is quite muted. “Death spares no one,” Oumou Sangaré sings, but we wonder where Celis wants to drag us with these Pathosformeln, since his dance cannot conjure up the weight.
Thankfully, the final part of the evening transports us to Pink Floyd’s rock era and some of their legendary songs from The Dark Side of the Moon. Even if you weren’t a fan, or haven’t seen the bombastic staging of The Wall, this earlier album from 1973 remains a milestone in the history of psychedelic rock music, and its cover design for the multi-million-selling LP may even provide the inspiration for the beam of light that dazzles us at the end of the dance piece. The use of this music, with its instrumental escapades and nods to musique concrète, is certainly a surprising coup for contemporary choreography and lighting design.
I focus entirely on the dance of the sixteen outstanding ensemble dancers, dressed in Eleni Chava’s tight black costumes with silver belts, who brilliantly interpret the demanding choreography of the relatively young Italian, Diego Tortelli. A few years ago, Tortelli caused a stir with his contribution Fo:No to the Venice Biennale, and he has since worked in the independent dance scenes of Hamburg and Munich, as well as in dance filmmaking. That he uses Pink Floyd’s music as the basis for his choreography surprised me, especially since his choreographic style and versatility, his exceptional command of stage space, and his architectural scenographic ideas (including movable screens, video projections, plexiglass mirrors and reversed perspectives) don’t require any “iconic” music. I find his title ironic, and yet the choreographer’s sensitivity to Roger Waters’s quirky text and David Gilmour’s voice is clearly evident.
I am satisfied just watching his movement language, which ranges widely, from Riverdance-like stiff upper body postures with whirling leg moves to wild break dance, from William Forsythe’s geometric neoclassical ballet abstractions to tanztheater expressionism (he once created an homage to Raimund Hoghe), including perverse and macabre facial grimaces and derangements with protruding tongues, and other provocations in the gazes and gestures. I admire the dancer who can stick out his long tongue and twist it downward.
In the first sequences the foot movement, a strangely beautiful waddling penguin walk, captivated my attention immediately. In later scenes, he has a male dancer walk up to the edge stage right, opening his arms wide, as if to embrace us; in the next moment he is gone, fallen into the abyss of the orchestra pit. Then the tilted glass panel wall comes down and we suddenly see five female dancers reflected and doubled in their elaborate, lightning-speed gyrating motions. The staging of the dance is a constant sequence of innovative surprises, and one can admire both Tortelli’s guts and the dancers’ total commitment to this language. And their offering some very eloquent gestural evocations, near the end, when they walk downstage to the edge, opening their arms as if offering their souls to us, then abruptly turn around and vanish to the back of the parallel columns, only to return again, and again, in a staccato rhythm. The finale to this dance concert was breathtaking.
*Johannes Birringer co-directs the Design and Performance Lab with Michèle Danjoux, and has taught Performance Technologies at Brunel University London. He is also the founder of an annual intermedia laboratory held at a disused coalmine in southwest Germany. DAP-Lab’s recent dance installations, kimospheres III–V (2016–19), explore the convergence of physical-sensory and augmented VR spaces. Birringer’s publications include Performance, Technology and Science, Dance and ChoreoMania, Tanz der Dinge/Things that Dance; his latest book, Kinetic Atmospheres (Routledge) probes the implications of environmental immersion and mixed reality digital architectures. Website: https://dap-lab.brunel.ac.uk/.
Copyright © 2025 Johannes Birringer
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #32, December 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
