Elegies — Black Box II

In theatre, a “black box” typically refers to a simple performance space, usually square in shape with black walls. It is the simplicity of the space that creates a multitude of possibilities for the configuration of stage and audience interaction – an open framework for artistic experimentation.

For the second edition of the “Black Box” series developed by ballet director Rémy Fichet, a black stage space once again becomes the focal point for various choreographic languages, this time on the Main Stage at Schauspiel Leipzig. Three works are emerging from the ranks of the ballet ensemble, focusing on Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Duino Elegies”. The Leipzig Ballet becomes a creative laboratory for choreographic innovation at the intersection of dance and literature.

Rilke’s “Elegies” revolve around existential questions, such as the longing for the transcendent, the confrontation with transience, and the necessity of transformation.
Three choreographers interpret Rilke, and each time, a different wound is laid bare. Andrea Carino follows desire: how love becomes a projection, how we do not love the other, but the image we have created of them. Desire that sustains – and that destroys. Movement becomes a mirror between attraction and dissolution, between the desire to hold on and the inability to let go.

Vincenzo Timpa pauses before the abyss between humanity and the absolute – before Rilke’s overwhelming angels, before the transience of childhood, before death as maturation rather than an end. At the centre of this, the brief, open radiance of childhood, before the world closes itself off to interpretation. Timpa asks what we lose when we cease to be open.

Marcelino Libao, on the other hand, reads the Fourth Elegy as a diagnosis of our present: in the lifeless puppet that Rilke conjures up, Libao recognises Artificial Intelligence as a mirror of a society that binds itself to the flawless and, in doing so, forgets what people can mean to one another. It is humanity itself that is at stake here.

As different as they are in their approaches, so similar are they in their questions: What remains of us? What do we reach for when we love, when we long, when we cling to the lifeless?
“Elegies – Black Box II” is a choreographic exploration of Rilke’s condensed language, very close to the audience, occupying a space somewhere between classical technique and contemporary expression.