No Ordinary Evening

While it is possible Spuck’s comical, crowd-pleasing Grand Pas de Deux (2000) has made its way to a local ballet gala in the past, he cannot be certain. Indeed, the seven-minute-long duet is in all likelihood his most frequently performed work. “I’ve lost control of where that’s performed,” he comments at the outset of this interview, suggesting the work’s shenanigans might bleed into real life.

Trained at the renowned John Cranko School, which is closely affiliated with the Stuttgart Ballet, Spuck’s early career involved a departure from classical ballet to work with two prolific Belgian artists – Jan Lauwers and Anne Teresa de Keersmaker. In 1995, he became a member of the Stuttgart Ballet’s ensemble. Since 2001, he has established himself as choreographer of ballets in Europe and North America.

His Poppea//Poppea (2009) – created for Gauthier Dance, the resident dance company of the Theaterhaus Stuttgart – was recognised by a jury of peers and awarded a 2011 German Theatre Prize DER FAUST. For his Winterreise (2018), Spuck was the recipient of a Prix Benois de la Danse in 2019.

Spuck’s profile as a choreographer of large-scale ensemble works for major arts institutions has also made him sought after as director of stagings of musical works. “About 15 years ago,” Spuck recalls, “I was invited to Heidelberg to direct a contemporary opera. This opportunity just led to more invitations. At this point, I have quite a history of directing operas. I was asked to direct a Verdi work, a bigger work. And I had to then ask myself, ‘How shall I deal with this new set of challenges?’ It can really benefit an opera to include some choreographic moments even when no dancers are involved.”

Spuck was appointed ballet director of the Ballett Zürich in the 2012/13 season, a role he retains to this day. From the 2023/24 season onwards, he will take on the challenge of directing the Staatsballett Berlin – a world-famous classical ballet company of over 80 dancers that has struggled to retain its artistic directors since Vladimir Malakhov’s departure in 2014.

Speaking of his impending relocation to Berlin, Spuck remarks that “there are so many possibilities in a company of that size. They have a very good classical repertory, which we cannot present in Zurich because we have only 36 dancers in total, plus 14 junior dancers. Every time Ballett Zürich performs Alexei Ratmansky’s big Swan Lake, we have to rehire 10 to 15 people, which is a massive task.”

The size of Ballett Zürich, however, has not limited the scale of Spuck’s creative vision. At the 2023 Adelaide Festival, Ballett Zürich will tour to Australia to perform a theatrical staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa da Requiem (2016) – a funeral mass first performed in 1874 for the anniversary of author Alessandro Manzoni’s death – which the festival markets as “a sacred oratorio with opera coursing through its veins”. Choreographed and directed by Spuck, Ballett Zürich will be supported by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and Adelaide Festival Chorus – altogether a cast of over two hundred.

The prospect of collaboration with local arts organisations – collaboration that is most likely the result of budget constraints on the programming of works of this scale – is perceived by Spuck as an opportunity: “We’re going to meet a lot of Australian artists and work together with them. We will have a cultural exchange. It’s much nicer than bringing everything and everyone to Adelaide, being in a bubble, and going back again.”

Adelaide Festival’s efforts to program the work amid the global pandemic have been fraught with disruptions that can be traced back by at least two years. Recapping Ballett Zürich’s on-again, off-again tour arrangements, Spuck states, “I met Adelaide Festival’s former artistic director, Rachel Healy, in Saint Petersburg. She said that she would love to have Messa da Requiem in the festival’s program. I was really excited about that, but COVID hit, and the tour’s planning just went forwards and backwards.

“At one point, we were told, ‘Adelaide Festival can make it work’. But there was a condition – everybody would have to be in quarantine for about 10 days upon arrival in Adelaide. That’s when we decided we could not do the tour. I could not take on such a responsibility. Although the dancers would have had the chance to work together during the quarantine period, our technicians and people from the costume department would have had to be in their rooms for 10 days. And I had just left quarantine in Moscow. I was in Moscow creating something for the Bolshoi Theatre and got COVID, before the vaccination was available.

“So, having stayed in a small hotel room for three weeks, I knew what quarantine meant for them.”

The tour to Adelaide is of significance to an Australian audience, as well as to Spuck and select ensemble members. Spuck is “looking forward to having one big tour again in our last season. It’s my last season in Zurich before I go to Berlin.” He proceeds to explain how “not every dancer will stay in Zurich to work with Cathy Marston, the next ballet director and chief choreographer of the Ballett Zürich. Some dancers will stop dancing, others will come with me to Berlin. The company as it exists now is going to change drastically.”

Moreover, acknowledging the rare occasion that Europe-based Australian dancers tour to their place of birth, Spuck recounts how, “When I received the invitation to Adelaide, I was so excited to tell the Australian dancers in the company. They’re all bringing their friends and sorting out tickets."

Although Messa da Requiem is no ordinary evening at the ballet, Spuck encourages his new audience to approach the work with an open mind. “The audience should just come and enjoy the music and the dance and how everything is combined,” he proposes. “It would make me happy if the Australian audience were to have a different view on Messa da Requiem than the European audience. And we can share that.”

As a performer of two of Spuck’s earlier works, this author advises the audience to expect group scenes featuring athletic dancers in near constant motion, performing carefully choreographed sequences embellished with idiosyncratic gestures and angular poses, which make use of their polished classical ballet technique, nonetheless.

In descriptions of the process of creating dance for the opera stage, Spuck emphasises similarities to working with dance companies, as opposed to differences. “The only difference,” Spuck finds, “is that singers come completely prepared for their first rehearsal. They know the text, what they have to sing, what the existing score is about. And the moment I start creating, they ask me, ‘Why do you want me to act like this?’ When I work with dancers on a ballet production, early rehearsals involve creating the choreographic ‘text’. Firstly, you have to create the movement, a storyboard, with the dancers. Only at the end of the process do dancers begin to ask, ‘Why do you want me to do it that way?’”

The harmony Spuck describes in his work with a large cast of singers and other musicians, who may not be sympathetic to ballet, indicates the search for an interface between choreography and opera was resolved at concept stage rather than in rehearsal rooms. “When we decided to put Messa da Requiem on stage, we had to acknowledge that it is beautiful and strong on its own,” he notes. “Neither does it need dancers. So, we asked ourselves, Are we going to put something on top? Should we tell the story of the writer, Manzoni, to whom the requiem was dedicated? Should we tell a story about Manzoni’s lifetime, of the Italian Risorgimento [unification]? Or should we tell a fictional story about loss?

“We decided against such storylines, because we would have to twist the music around to suit an idea, disrespect it. The conductor, Fabio Luisi, and I were clear on this. Instead, we made an abstract work that, by including dancing, lets audience members hear the music with their eyes and better understand the composition.”

Spuck’s rationale for his interpretation of Messa da Requiem touches upon key points that also seem to underpin his vision for the Staatsballett Berlin’s future: a respect for historical repertory; a belief in the adequacy of balletic movement as the substance of contemporary creative work; and a strong regard for the audience.

“Staatsballett Berlin performs in three different opera houses in the same city. There’s no other company in the world that does that. It makes planning quite complex, but it’s of benefit the company, too.” (Staatsballett Berlin’s 2004 founding is a consequence of the consolidation of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Komische Oper Berlin and the Staatsoper Unter den Linden.)

“The ballet is really everywhere, he continues. “I watched performances of Giselle receive standing ovations. A week later, I saw a mixed bill featuring a work by Sharon Eyal. On that occasion, a completely different audience was also giving the dancers standing ovations. The company has such a broad audience base. And that’s so like the city of Berlin. It’s so diverse. I intend to make the Staatsballett Berlin even more diverse, embed it even more deeply into the city.” 

Christian Spuck will take his position at the Staatsballett Berlin for the 2023/4 season. British choreographer Cathy Marston will step into the role of artistic director of the Zurich Ballet. She has a Swiss passport, and was previously artistic director of the Bern Ballett from 2007 to 2013.