BERLIN STATE OPERA BALLET.

BERLIN STATE OPERA BALLET

STAATSOPER UNTER DEN LINDEN BERLIN DECEMBER 20, 1998

The new double bill of the Berlin State Opera Ballet combines two works that were originally created over a nine-year period. However, a world war between the two world premieres changed the musical styles substantially. While Richard Strauss's Joseph's Legend (1914), with its lavish, ecstatic sound, conjured, perhaps for the last time, the fin-de-siecle mood, Paul Hindemith's rarely played Demon (1923) is a coolsober product of a completely new movement called Neue Sachlichkeit ("new functionality"). The connection between the two short ballets is the literary theme: seduction and sexual desire.

Both ballets are difficult to stage--no easy task for the young English-New Zealand choreographer and former Ballet Rambert dancer Mark Baldwin. After Labyrinth, his Theseus and Ariadne ballet, this was only his second time working with the Berlin company.

In Baldwin's interpretation of The Demon, lasting scarcely twenty minutes, there is a sequence of images of a demon who wants to seduce two women; when he falls in love with one of them he loses his magic power and must die. Baldwin cast the demon with two dancers, a man and a woman, according to their human aspects, with both dancers on pointe. Beatrice Knop and former Trockadero star Bart de Block comprise the energetic and technically brilliant couple who dominate the production.

Baldwin creates mysterious images, using dancers abstractly. The setting, designed by Michael Howells, consists of five sloping portals in lime green, like the costumes--an almost surreal composition of dance, design, and light.

The sumptuous stage design by Stephen Brimson Lewis for Joseph's Legend is almost overwhelming; dark blue curtains open on a stage of scarlet pyramids. Unfortunately, the choreography cannot always correspond to the sensuous and sensual glow of these luminescent colors.

The pillars of the one-hour performance are the three protagonists: the innocent Joseph (Michael Rissmann), the aristocratic Potiphar (de Block or Jens Weber), and his tragically lustful wife (Bettina Thiel).

In comparison to John Neumeier's 1977 version, Baldwin's movement vocabulary remains more static and ceremonial, and the stiff Egyptian style in which the figures dance somehow neutralizes the eroticism of the story. Both Potiphar and Joseph have space-devouring solos that include a variety of jumps; while Potiphar's wife has a wonderfully soft and emotional solo just before she kills herself.

Although he is not an outstanding storyteller, Baldwin gives his production a noble atmosphere and tries to serve the bombastic music with a mixture of classical, modern, and ritual dance. The ballet reaches its climax exactly at the end: female slaves sit in a row behind the mummified wife of Potiphar and seem to row along the Nile to the Kingdom of the Dead. Potiphar remains alone--a magnificent image, gradually enclosed by the pyramid curtains.