To put it drastically, the choreographer Christian Spuck, who has just been appointed by the mayor and Senator for Culture Klaus Lederer (Left Party), is as suited to lead the Berlin State Ballet as Justin Bieber is the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic.

Bieber can read notes.

Spuck can package fragments of the educated bourgeois canon in his repetitive, superficial, robert-wilson-just-faster-like postmodern chic aesthetic in such a way that if you don't look closely, you think it's contemporary dance.

For deep, possibly for narrative ballet.

It has been twenty years since the Stuttgart Ballet appointed the dancer, who was accepted into the company in 1995, as resident choreographer.

At that time Spuck began to choreograph away well-known titles from the drama and opera repertoire.

Fin de siècle: Wedekind's “Lulu”.

Romanticism: ETA Hoffmann's “Sandmann” and his “Fräulein von S.”, Büchner's “Woyzeck”, “Don Q (uichote)”, “Falstaff”, “Orpheus”, “Winterreise” and soon, at the end of his ten-year career as a native of Zurich Successor to ballet director Heinz Spoerli, a Monteverdi evening.

Does that sound eclectic?

It looks surprisingly similar choreographically on stage.

What does Spuck's appointment mean for Berlin?

Like Marco Goecke, who also started out as a Stuttgart resident choreographer, stayed there from 2005 to 2018 and took on a ballet director position in Hanover for the first time in 2019, Spuck also looked for a long time like the ordered and uncollected Prince. Spoerli only gave up Zurich in 2012 at the age of 72. If you look at Spuck's upcoming season in Zurich, you will notice that, in addition to his own works, only pieces by contemporary choreographers are on the program. Among them are well-known names such as Crystal Pite, who formed her swarming and cluster-forming dancer formations at the Paris Opera. For Zurich, things continued with Spuck in a similar way as before with Spoerli.

What does that mean for Berlin? If the repertoire of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries does not appear in a house like Zurich, it does not have to mean that the fifty-one year old only dances Spuck and Friends in Berlin. Should it be so, it would be a scandal for a company like the Staatsballett. Then one could put the make-up on the connection to the ballet world that Lederer invoked. In any case, it is a problem when a ballet director hardly knows the repertoire in question. Spuck has only danced with Jan Lauwers, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and the Stuttgart Ballet to John Cranko, has hardly worked on houses, with ballerinas and choreographers who would have familiarized him with a wide variety of historical styles and techniques. But you can't just do it like that.You have to be passionately interested in it and deal with it all your life as a dancer and director. Nothing in Spuck's biography suggests this.

Berlin's Senator for Culture and his advisory jury have a conception of the State Ballet that would fly around their ears at the opera or at concerts. How often do you have to spell the word repertoire in dance so that it no longer sounds like a swear word? How often do you have to read Reclam's ballet dictionary from A to Z to those responsible so that they learn that choreographies by Merce Cunningham and Frederick Ashton, Trisha Brown and Antony Tudor, Deborah Hay or Ninette de Valois, by Bronislava Nijinska, Léonide Massine and Michel Fokine , by George Balanchine and August Bournonville form the repertoire of an art that is not only present but has a rich tradition and past.

A ballet ensemble mustn't be a museum, that's what they always say. No, but it can't be a gallery either. The older and most recent dance history knows choreographers, the classics are like Mozart and Mahler in music. And as in music, the audience has a right to get to know it. In Germany, the Bavarian State Ballet will be the last ensemble to which the audience can make this claim at all. This is a catastrophe for the art of dance.