Last night my husband
and I went to see the modern dance production of Woyzeck at the Norwegian Opera and Ballet. It was in fact the
fourth performance of this modern dance piece; it premiered in Oslo during the
last week of September. The story of Woyzeck, written originally as a play by
Georg Büchner, has also been adapted as an opera and as a number of different films,
but this was one of the few times it has been presented as a dance piece. It
was created by the German choreographer Christian Spuck to music by Martin
Donner, Philip Glass, Gyorgy Kurtag, and Alfred Schnittke. As fate would have
it, Inger-Margrethe Lunde, the theater critic for Aftenposten (the Norwegian
newspaper), did not like it. In fact, she strongly disliked it, going so far as
to call it ‘bullshit’. I am attaching the link to her review (in Norwegian—it can
be translated using Google Translate but you have to tolerate some weird
translations here and there): http://oslopuls.aftenposten.no/kunst_scene/article605271.ece. She headlined
her review with the words “Embarrassing and disappointing”, followed by “Bullshit,
I think, despite the frantic, endless standing ovation”. And the review gets
worse from there, ending with the same-- “Bullshit, I think”…… I cannot
remember ever reading a review of any production, dance or otherwise, quite
like hers. When I read her review, I thought, yikes, just our luck; we have
season tickets to the ballet, and Woyzeck was the first dance of the season for
our subscription. I have to say I was dreading it, because there is nothing
worse than sitting for two hours watching something that is boring. That has
happened on occasion—that I have been bored by an opera, but I do manage to
differentiate between my subjective feelings and my objective appraisal of the
actual performance—were the singers good, were the sets attractive, and so on.
I am not opposed to someone writing a negative review, but hers could have been
more professionally-done. In any case, as luck would have it, we ended up not
sharing Lunde’s opinion of Woyzeck. And in fact I have to wonder if we actually
saw the same dance piece. I cannot understand what it was she did not like, and
have to conclude that it was the theme of the story (the humiliation and
cruelty that one man is subjected to that results in a tragic outcome) that
bothered her. That I can understand—that it would have bothered her. But not that it would lead to her disliking the entire
production or calling it bullshit. Because it wasn’t. I was actually quite
moved by this dance production, especially by one of the final scenes where the
low-ranking soldier Woyzeck dances with his girlfriend Marie who has been
unfaithful to him; the dancer who played Woyzeck last night, Kaloyan Boyadjiev,
was wonderfully expressive with his body and his arms, and really made you feel
his humiliation, his pain and his desperation. His murder of Marie is the
culmination of a long series of humiliations that he has been forced to endure
because of his poverty; he is often humiliated by the army for which he does
odd jobs and by the scientists who poke and probe him as part of the experiment
that he is a part of. He endures all of these humiliations in order to earn
some money, and when he comes home in the evening to Marie and their son, he is
free and you see that in the way they dance with each other. They actually know
some happiness and they seem to be in love. So that makes it all the more
tragic and poignant at the end when he realizes he has lost her, lost the only
thing that means anything to him.
Apart from what Lunde
explained about the story of Woyzeck in her review (and I forgot the plot by
the time we went to see it), I really did not know the story in detail nor what
we were about to see when we walked into the theater. It was the same for my
husband. During the dance, I had so many thoughts and feelings about what was
transpiring on stage. Franz Kafka came to mind (as it did for my husband as
well), as well as the brilliant English series, The Prisoner, with Patrick McGoohan (where the prisoner, a former spy,
was just a number, surrounded by a nameless bureaucratic system of jailers all
trying to probe him for information). The feeling of systematic cruelty, of a
total lack of empathy, pervaded the piece. I found myself thinking about
totalitarianism and communism and the loss of personal dignity and identity. So
if a dance piece can make me feel all those things, as well as move me because
of its poignancy, then for me it was something of value that I was privileged
to experience. It is impossible to defend the man Woyzeck because he murdered
Marie, but it is completely possible to understand what drove him to do that. I
felt sorry for him in spite of his tragic choice. That is a testament to the
quality of the dancing and the quality of the production. I’m proud to say that
I disagree completely with Inger-Margrethe Lunde, and I truly hope, as my
husband also commented, that her review did not discourage people from going to
see the production. My guess is that it did, unfortunately. So perhaps she should
take heed for the future and remember that the dancers have worked hard,
likewise the choreographer. She should separate her personal feelings from an
objective appraisal of the production. There do exist objective criteria for the evaluation of cultural events and creations. Perhaps she had a bad day going into the
theater—car broke down, problems at work, or other irritations. Let’s hope she
manages to write a better review next time.
