Gastspiel Ballett am Rhein Martin Schläpfer - 7

Dancers in heavy boots and dark coats appear to arrive from a long journey into a world which could become their new home. Music and dance merge into a whirlpool of frantic activity and then suddenly there is total ease, subtle humour and childish naivety with virtuosity on pointe.

"Composing a symphony means, to me, building a new world with every available technical means" thus Gustav Mahler once summed up his own creative work. In Martin Schläpfer’s full-length ballet 7 the world becomes a stage on which the challenges of life seem to be literally written into the bodies of the dancers. The choreography finds its landscape of stance and friction in Mahler’s vast symphonic architecture. This together with deep inner conflicts and a restlessness anxiety continually collides in the music of the Seventh Symphony. Passages of other-worldly enchantment accompany those more banal. The homeward journey is no longer in contradiction to the state of vagrancy but seems within it to find itself.