Future 6
A production of Theaterhaus Stuttgart in cooperation with Schauburg Munich
With choreographies by Jiří Bubeníček, Itzik Galili, Eric Gauthier, Marco Goecke, Cayetano Soto and Stephan Thoss

Theaterhaus Stuttgart, T1
Friday, January 11 at 8:00 p.m. (première) / Saturday, January 12 at 8:00 p.m. / Sunday, January 13 at 7:00 p.m

Looking ahead: The future of dance is shaped today – by choreographers like the ones Eric Gauthier has brought together for his new programme. The fact that five of the six pieces are world premières shows the close links between the international dance scene and the Dance Company Theaterhaus Stuttgart.

Cayetano Soto was a dancer with the ballettTheater Munich before he embarked on a high-profile career as a choreographer. His stilistic diversity impresses as much as his unusual ideas. In M/C for the Royal Ballet of Flanders he told of the friendship between Marilyn Monroe and the writer Truman Capote, and in his sensationally successful Canela Fina he had the Balé da Cidade de São Paulo dance amidst fragrant clouds of cinnamon. In his work, Soto feels drawn towards the seekers – people and artists who do not fit into our concepts. Just like La Lupe, the Queen of Latin Soul, he has admired since his youth and who has now inspired him to his choreographic tribute Malasangre. To be sure, it is not the Cuban singer he associates with the Spanish word for vicious or bad temper. It is the wholesale, thoughtless rejection she constantly met with. Her wild, crazy and, by the standards of the puritan early sixties, incredibly offensive life ended in 1992, in extreme poverty. Her music is there to stay.

The new duo by Itzik Galili also comes with a distinctly Cuban touch. During a journey to the Caribbean island state, the Israeli choreographer residing in the Netherlands fell in love with the music of the „King of Mambo, Pérez Prado. For Future 6, he chose Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White, an originally French classic of Latin Jazz which went around the world in the instrumental version by Prado and the trumpeter Billy Regis. An ultimate feel-good piece and mood booster, presented by one of today's leading choreographers who also created one of the big audience favourites of Gauthier Dance – the acrobatic homo-hetero comedy The Sofa.

For 13 years, he and his twin brother Otto were the star dancers of John Neumeier's famous Hamburg Ballet. However, in 2006, Prix Benois de la Danse award winner Jiří Bubeníček decided to move on to pastures new. He did not only become First Soloist with the Semperoper Ballett Dresden but has also made his mark as choreographer with prestigious companies like the New York City Ballet, Ballet Zurich, the National Ballet China as well as his former company, the Hamburg Ballet. For Gauthier Dance he wants to question the most existential and enigmatic human emotion: love. What's real in love – and what is just a reflection of social expectations, a romantic illusion caused by the media? Bubeníček's choreographic exploration takes one female and three male dancers right into the dreamscape of the inner soul.

His lasting fascination with the sound he used for his short trio Taiko has made Eric Gauthier team up with composer Stephan M. Boehme once again. What is more, the new acoustic encounter is set to become even more impressive as, this time, the nine dancers create the music themselves: live, on big taiko drums. Still bent on fusing the beats of the mighty Japanese percussion instruments with movement, Gauthier is also heading towards an inner space. Full of haunting, poetic images, Takuto (the Japanese word for „beat“) sends them on a liberating quest for the centre within. The Artistic Director of Gauthier Dance would like his audience to share the experience his dancers achieve in the end: to get in touch with their own personal rhythm.

They were colleagues in Gauthier's last season with the Stuttgart Ballet – but this is the first time Marco Goecke actually creates a solo for him. Gauthier is delighted at the collaboration, not only for the sake of old ties. The Choreographer in Residence of the Stuttgart Ballett and the Scapino Ballet Rotterdam and, from next season, Associate Choreographer of the Nederlands Dans Theater ranks among the prime movers of contemporary dance. I Found a Fox is the title of his new piece for Gauthier Dance – a line from Kate Bush's iconic Hounds of Love and a clue to Goecke's inspiration. For his new choreography, the Prix Nijinsky award winner has chosen songs from Bush's legendary album The Dreaming of 1982. An early milestone in the unconventional art-life synthesis Kate Bush – a musician to whom Goecke has long wanted to pay a personal choreographic tribute.

Listening to music is known to keep you young. But what if you are so old that it seems too late for being young in the first place? Stephan Thoss, the Artistic Director of the Hessian State Theatre of Wiesbaden and multiple award winner, knows the answer: do it anyway. In his hilarious thought experiment, a civilised tea party of six old ladies is faced with Ravel's Bolero – a piece which has been danced countless times, usually coming with a large dose of overblown eroticism. With Thoss, everything is different. It does not take more than a plate of petit-four and a record of the all-time classic to gradually unleash the sedate circle. In the end, the old-fashioned living room with the worn-out furniture is filled with chaos – and the message is obvious: It is never too late for the birth of movement from the spirit of music. Just have the courage to live your life.

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