A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Gamle Scene, Kongens Nytorv 9, Cph K; performances at 20:00 on Tuesday, Wednesday, Mar 25, Mar 26, Mar 27, Mar 29, Mar 30, April 8, April 13, April 14, April 17, April 19, April 21, April 22; tickets 90–675kr; duration 180 mins incl an intermission; www.kglteater.dk

Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” is a tale that ends well. Four lovers, escaping the restrictions and duties of family and society find themselves in a magical forest, mixing and consorting with fairy kings. The play is a comedy, and in true Shakespeare fashion, the humor ends with a grand wedding. Yet the play is not performed for an easy laugh at the theatre; it is the story of a crises of indistinction, in which human and animal, reality and dream, the individual and the milieu merge.  John Neumeier has adapted this narrative, based on dialogue, into wordless ballet- performers communicating the complexity of love through silent gesture and movement.

The ballet has been in the Royal Danish Ballet’s repertoire for over thirty years, although quite some time has passed since its last performance. This has allowed for a cast of new faces, freshening up the traditional ballet.  Neumeier, on the subject of the ballet’s evolution stated, ‘"A Midsummer Night's Dream" has changed a lot, and is constantly evolving. When it was originally danced, it had a slightly different shape… the values have changed’.  For a ballet based on a play hundreds of years old, this shift is important and Neumeier’s flexibility necessary in achieving a relevant link between modern day and the days of fairy kings and magical forests.

Neumeier’s direction of the ballet is actually an adaptation of an original, produced and choreographed by the great George Balanchine,  one of the original founders and balletmaster of the New York City Ballet.  Balanchine simplified Shakespeare’s narrative into two acts and combined the ballet with the music of Felix Mendelssohn, who had composed  an overture based on Shakespeare’s play nearly 150 years earlier. “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” by the young Mendelssohn was what clearly defined him as a musical genius, as it was written at the age of seventeen.  In addition to the overture, which is used to introduce every main character,  Balanchine incorporated Mendelssohn’s ‘Incidental Music’ which was written just a few years before the composer’s early death.

Neumeier’s fundamental addition to Balanchine’s original is the incorporation of the musical works of György Ligeti, a Hungarian born avant-garde composer, most known for his piano and electronic works. Balanchine incorporates Ligeti’s soundworks during the dream sequences, while retaining the classical Mendelssohn for the real-time elements of the ballet (so if you’re completely lost in the story, at least you’ll know what’s real and what’s just in their heads).

The ballet as a whole, while originally conceived by Balanchine,  is predominantly the love child of Neumeier, whose masterful translation of narrative to movement has won him the ‘Golden Mask’ award in Russia, for Moscow’s best contemporary dance production.  His praise continues, as the woman who discovered him (none other than the mystical dancer Sybil Shearer) reflects on the choreographer’s progression, ‘Yes, the phenomenon of John Neumeier is unique in the world of ballet. He is avant-garde in an entirely different way from anyone else. He is not rebelling, he is not straining for recognition, lie is not taking up a cause, or joining a school, or throwing out the past. He is simple; through his own integrity and insight, pointing a way to the future.’