March 2008
Nacho Duato, artistic director of Spain's Compañía Nacional de Danza, guides his ballet troupe with a bold and beautiful contemporary vision.
The Madrid company, which displayed Duato’s choreographic genius in a November 2002 appearance at Penn State, returns to Eisenhower Auditorium for a performance at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 4.
Duato, one of the most celebrated choreographers in the world, created each of the three dances on the Penn State program.
Gilded Goldbergs, a 2006 work making its United States premiere on this tour, features British composer Robin Holloway’s breakneck adaptation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The dance is a high-speed kinetic dialogue between dancers and music.
“Discovering Robin Holloway’s adaptation of the Goldberg Variations allowed me to get past what I had always considered as the untouchable character of Bach’s original,” Duato says. “I finally managed to approach the written music, to work with it and thus create this performance. In any event, as I have made clear in this piece of work, adapting a masterpiece such as this might be taken as a synonym of murder, and yet it also could represent its rebirth. The work takes on a new life, a whole new dimension. What Holloway does so well is to show his courage by placing creative freedom above and beyond the burden of history.”
The songs, dances, and rituals of Moroccan mystical brotherhoods that originated in sub-Saharan Africa inspired Gnawa, a 2005 dance originally choreographed for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. The sensual dance, set to music from Spain and North Africa, evokes the landscapes and people of the Mediterranean.
Por Vos Muero, a revival of a work created in 1996, offers tribute to the role dance played in Spanish culture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It employs period music and the spoken words of Garcilaso de la Vega, a Spanish poet-soldier influential in helping to introduce Italian Renaissance verse forms and poetic techniques to Spain.
State College is one of only four North American locations the company, which infrequently crosses the Atlantic, is scheduled to visit on this tour, which also takes the company to San Francisco, Seattle, and Montreal.
The company, which features eleven principal dancers and sixteen in the corps de ballet, astounded an Eisenhower audience in its lone previous appearance at Penn State with Duato’s Multiplicity: Forms of Silence and Emptiness, an evening-length work set to music by J. S. Bach.
Duato studied dance at the Rambert School in London, the Mudra School in Brussels, and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center in New York City. He began dancing professionally in 1980 with Cullberg Ballet Stockholm. A year later he joined Nederlands Dans Theater in The Netherlands. His first attempt at choreography, a piece called Jardí Tancat set to music by Maria del Mar Bonet, earned him the first prize at the International Choreographic Workshop in Cologne.
In 1990, after having choreographed for companies including Frankfurt Ballet, Les Grand Ballets Canadiens, San Francisco Ballet, and American Ballet Theatre, Duato accepted the position of artistic director with Compañía Nacional de Danza. The company had been founded in 1979 under the name Ballet Nacional de España Clásico.
Duato has transformed the company into a ballet that, without ignoring classical conventions, has evolved a more contemporary style. He uses commissioned works plus his own choreography to give the troupe its distinctive identity. Seven years ago Duato earned the Benois de la Danse, an award for excellence in choreography presented by the International Dance Association.
Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion scheduled to feature Duato, is offered in Eisenhower Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders. Artistic Viewpoints regularly fills to capacity. Seating is available on a first-arrival basis.
Adult $39
University Park Student $21
18 and Younger $30
