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So much hate and love.
At least when it comes to ballet in Berlin at the moment.
SPD school senator Sandra Scheeres has lost in every process that her authority has unleashed against the two directors of the state ballet school.
The result: destroyed livelihoods, waste of tax money, an elite institute in agony.
Things don't look much better at the State Ballet since the abstruse departure of the suddenly rather disharmonious leadership duo Sasha Waltz and Johannes Öhman.
The troupe of ninety dancers dawns.
Now she occasionally speaks out via video stream under the almost ironic title “From Berlin with Love”.
Instead of some kind of online premieres that would reveal at least a little creative desire.
There are only ever newly combined, sometimes only replayed pas de deux and solos from the repertoire or from in-house talents.
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John Neumeier in Hamburg, on the other hand, is busy, working behind the scenes on his “Beethoven Project II”, but is not allowed to show it because of the lockdown.
And he doesn't want to go online with it either.
People in Bavaria are more pragmatic.
The State Ballet originally wanted to bring out one of the now rare contemporary three-part works in the National Theater in November.
The triptych entitled “Paradigm” could not come out because of the corona quarantine of the whole group.
Scene from "Paradigma - Bedroom Folk" by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar in Munich
Source: Wilfried Hösl
Then it was postponed twice because of the lockdown.
Unfortunately, in a recording from December 18 on the website of the Bavarian State Opera, it was broadcast in a technically jerky manner (still available for a fee).
The result is excellently implemented clothing of today's design.
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Russell Maliphant's tame, calm trio "Broken Fall", once refined by Sylvie Guillem, was taken up again from his own repertoire.
In it, two men in gray, in a dim light mood, pass a lady in a silvery top to each other and lever them over their shoulders - until she alone dances towards the end.
The Israelis Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar also follow their usual, paradigmatic patterns. In “Bedroom Folk” from 2015, eight couples in the Chorus Line wiggle their hips in a moderately lascivious manner to gentle beats.
So much known repetition in red and blue light makes you sleepy;
even if the men in black tights, who are sometimes called for as soloists, let their pelvis circling famously.
Four pairs are also used in Liam Scarlett's “With a Chance of Rain” for seven predominantly lyrical Rachmaninoff piano pieces.
This is nicely neoclassical and not at all reversible, shows nice interplay between solos, pas de deux and sextets.
But it doesn't get a dog out of quarantine either.
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Beyond the manageable innovative performance of the brave denomination, one wonders why Munich's dance director Igor Zelensky had to hire Liam Scarlett, who was only killed in London last year because of a #MeToo scandal with the boys from the Royal Ballet School, for such dozen items?
Is the occupational therapy argument enough?
But the stubbornly old-fashioned Russian has never cared about political correctness anyway ...
The fear of the unknown
A Nuremberg online experiment in the State Opera's website "fundus" was much more productive.
From a mood of listening to oneself over the past few months, as he himself relates in the captivating prologue, the long-time ballet director Goyo Montero has re-created Sergej Prokofiev's children's classic "Peter and the Wolf" as the inner voices of an aging chamber actor (strong: Thomas Nunner) put on.
First, the ego wanders through the opera house labyrinth, only to transform itself on stage into Peter, grandfather, cat, bird, duck.
For “Über den Wolf”, which dancers and speakers are looking for in a sensual and sensual way, but also dark and disturbing, Owen Belton created new soundscapes to complement the Prokofiew fragments.
The Spaniard Montero, once a celebrated character dancer himself at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and the film director Hans Hadulla find the perspective changing pictorial situations for the fear of the unknown.
The symbolic predator as a real perceived threat that mixes animal instincts and human emotions.
For 50 strong minutes you experience a familiar classic in a completely new way, watch a creative, thriller-like aberration in distress.
And I quickly know that something of the pandemic mood of these months has spilled over into art over the long term.
A startlingly moving Covid bestiary of a special kind. That bares its teeth ominously.