Requiem!!

SEPTEMBER 11-20, 1997 REVIEWED BY BARBARA ZUCK

To open its twentieth-an anniversary season, BalletMet Columbus made a daring departure: it presented the North American premiere of a strikingly contemporary dance-theater piece by German choreographer Birgit Scherzer, whose work is virtually unknown in this country. Moreover, the company danced the piece in a hall smaller than its customary home.

By performing Scherzer's Requiem!! in the 800-seat Capitol Theatre, BalletMet took a chance of losing that part of its audience used to seeing big story ballets in the spacious Ohio Theatre. The Capitol Theatre, which opened in 1989, has a fresh, new look quite unlike Columbus's other downtown venues, all of which are restored antiques. Thus BalletMet matched repertory to theater.

Requiem!! is a three-part evening-length work performed without intermission. It is danced to Mozart's Requiem, although Scherzer takes the sections out of sequence and repeats several of them. The work begins and ends with the heart-rending Lacrimosa, the first bars of which it is said Mozart wrote just before he died. Scherzer reminds the audience of this before the dancing begins by letting the first two phrases of the Lacrimosa sound alone in the darkened hall.

Premiered in 1991 by Scherzer's company, the Saarbrucken Staatstheater Ballett, Requiem!! unites Scherzer with dramaturge Matthias Kaiser; her assistant and Saarbrucken dancer, Sven Grutzmacher; set and costume designer Brigitte Benner; and lighting designers John Bohuslawsky and Judy Barto. The ballet is masterfully staged and relies heavily on the imaginative and highly dramatic production values created by this team.

Benner's intriguing set is the foundation for the whole ballet. It is a room of stark white walls that extend out into the hall. It has only one door, set up above the stage at rear center. In the opening scene, the character of Death stands, backlit, in the doorway as bodies pour through the hole.

It is helpful to know a fair amount about Mozart's life, since much of the drama revolves around it. A different dancer portrays Mozart in each part, and items from his life--an umbrella, for example, because it snowed the day he died--are not only imbued with dramatic meaning but help create stunning tableaux.

Still, the dominant character is Death, danced on opening night by Grutzmacher. Death is uncompromising, all-powerful, a muscleman ready to do battle. The taxing choreography for the rest of the cast made unusual demands on BalletMet, which looked thoroughly grounded and polished performing Scherzer's big, earthy movement vocabulary.

Requiem!! is an ambitious work and, perhaps, finds its biggest failing in that very fact. Somewhere in part three one becomes emotionally fatigued. Neither the drama nor the energy is successfully sustained, though the brilliantly staged finale feels like an exclamation point at the end of the whole draining experience. When the umbrella symbolizing the composer bursts into flames and quickly disappears, leaving the hall in total darkness, Scherzer has magically evoked that singular flame of genius that burned brightly for such a brief time.