Ballet: Goldberg Variations - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Tabula Rasa

Musical direction
Christopher Koncz

Music
Arvo Pärt

Choreography, stage and light
Ohad Naharin

Costumes
Eri Nakamura


Goldberg Variations

Music
Johann Sebastian Bach

Choreography and costumes
Heinz Spoerli

Stage
Florian Etti

Light
Robert Eisenstein

Rehearsal
Arman Grigoryan Chris Jensen

Piano
William Youn


Contents

In 1742, Johann Sebastian Bach called his Goldberg Variations a simple piano exercise consisting of an aria with various variations – and composed a fascinating compendium of variations, canons and fugues. In 1993, the Swiss choreographer Heinz Spoerli accepted the challenge of meeting Bach's opus summum of the piano literature with dance - and created one of his signature works: a dance drama about people, their joys and fears, loneliness, based on making music with the body and lusts, bonds and breaks, youth and old age. Goldberg Variations unfolds an 80-minute panorama of life, which is juxtaposed with a choreography by Ohad Naharin with Tabula Rasa to the composition of the same name by Arvo Pärt - also as a premiere by the Vienna State Ballet. The works of the Israeli are declarations of love to the body in movements full of freedom, power, eroticism and wildness, but also purity, tenderness and vulnerability. Following an ancient philosophical idea, the term »tabula rasa« describes people as initially »blank slates«. Ohad Naharin draws his explorations of the ego and the body as touching kinetic-meditative experiences on one of these.



Subject to change.