Two hours before the start of the show, Niranh Chanthabouasy relaxes in the café chair with a view of the skyline.

The back of his chair almost touches the façade of the Alte Oper.

He doesn't feel any tension or even stage fright when he's performing on the biggest and most important stages.

Not when he's performing "Flying Bach."

"For what feels like the thousandth time," as he says with a laugh.

On tour with the globally successful show, which has been spectacularly fusing Bach with breakdance for ten years, night after night he feels more and more excited "to be able to show the vocabulary of my art with joy and friends".

Last Wednesday evening at the Alte Oper was nevertheless a special evening for Chanthabouasy.

His family is in the audience.

And she doesn't see him alone, with headphones on his ears, practicing in his apartment in Frankfurt's Ostend, as he often does.

Instead, they dance in the spotlight in the midst of the Flying Steps ensemble, which has had a decisive influence on Chanthabouasy for over ten years.

The 42-year-old, whose roots are in Laos, is both a haven of peace and an anchor for the other seven dancers in the group.

They are seven boys and a ballerina, all top athletes.

They show high-performance sport.

Highest energy and intensity

55 minutes before the start of the show, he calmly leaves the café.

From 8 p.m. he is on stage in the Alte Oper.

It seems as if enormous jolts and blows and waves are ripping through his body, which combine at a sometimes insane tempo to form amazing choreographies.

A liaison of lightness and joie de vivre in the middle of a show that playfully mixes high and low culture.

And it also works so well because it once broke new ground and is still able to surprise today, how naturally one hears Bach's preludes and fugues in the "Well-Tempered Clavier" and sees "headspins" at the same time.

On the stage is the grand piano on the left and the harpsichord on the right, and right in the middle the young wild ones of the Flying Steps meet the old master Bach and play the empty space for 70 minutes with the highest energy and intensity.

Headspins are not Chanthabouasy's thing.

The younger members of the crew also twirl around every possible axis of their well-trained bodies across the stage in such a way that the spectators turn their heads to the left and right, like in tennis, in order to be able to follow.

The urban dance forms popping (with their robot-like movements) and locking are his athletic and artistic home.

But of course he also has various elements of breakdance and hip-hop in his repertoire.

Chanthabouasy has the role of the trainer, so to speak, he is not just a participating observer, but a boss who plays along.

He feels immediately and exactly how his fellow campaigners are feeling, whether the show is going smoothly or whether they have to fight something.

"It's never boring because it's never perfect.

That's good because you're always on a journey together," he says.

The Frankfurter – he persistently rejects all advances to finally move to Berlin to the headquarters of the Flying Steps – is one of the founding fathers of “Flying Bach”.

He helped devise the choreographies.

And he's been on stage since the very beginning ten years ago.

Known locally as "Lil Rock," Chanthabouasy is both a veteran and a literal pacesetter.

The new dancers in the ensemble need his confidence and class.

While the pandemic was at a standstill, some have reoriented themselves, for example accepted jobs at variety theaters that had restarted earlier.

The evening in the Alte Oper, which was followed by a guest performance in Wiesbaden on Thursday, was originally supposed to have taken place in May 2020 and then in September 2021.