How long have you been planning and preparing the project? The rehearsals for the Norwegian company must have taken place gradually. I heard that they often perform your works.
The project has been in preparation for a very long time and seven of my assistants are working on it. And as always with large companies that have Manon Lescaut or Swan Lake, big classical pieces and other titles in their repertoire, it's very complicated. Some of my pieces have already been performed by the ballet company, and some are premiering. Some of my installations will also have their world premiere. Putting it all together will therefore be a huge effort.

None of your festivals have been on such a scale, with so many works and installations. It's probably the first time... Although last year, thanks to the initiative of Kateřina Hanáčková, PR Baletu ND, your sculptures, created using a special scanning technique, were exhibited on Václav Havel Square in Prague under the title Moving Still, and films were shown directly in the National Theater building. Personally, I missed some of the choreographies you staged here during the gala evening at the National Theater.
I inserted a minimalist composition entitled Port de Bras between the individual films to give the audience a break from their intense viewing. And there was no time at all to rehearse any of my other choreographies. It was actually a miracle that it worked out at all.

I still don't understand why something like the Norwegian Kylián Festival, the National Theater in Prague, or the Nederlands Dans Theater in The Hague doesn't organize something like this.
You shouldn't ask me, you should ask the people who are in charge of it and the management of the individual companies. There's a completely new management in the Netherlands, and I didn't give much of myself in Prague, so I don't have any special relationship with them. So it's actually typical that such an event is in Norway, and I'm really looking forward to it...

What was your criteria for selecting the choreographies for the two Norwegian evenings? The titles of both performances are related to the passage of time, which is certainly meant to be a play on words... Day BeforeTomorrow (Bella Figura, Gods and Dogs, Wings of Wax), Day After Yesterday (Forgotten Land, No More Play, Petite Mort, Symphony of Psalms).
It's obviously a play on words, because both days are the same day, they actually mean the same thing. The day before tomorrow and the day after yesterday actually mean today.
It's also a play on time. Because the moment "now" doesn't exist. Now is already the past... It's important to realize this and understand how incredibly precious and rare time actually is.
Let me tell you a story about that. I recently worked with a company at the Het Nationale Ballet in Amsterdam. I didn't want to work there before and mix the repertoire of the Nederlands Dans Theater with Het Nationale Ballet. There were a lot of people from the theater in the dance hall, because it was my first time there in fifty years of living in the Netherlands. I was presenting Wings of Wax with them. The assistants had rehearsed it excellently... But I thought it could be a little better.
I called one of the dancers and asked her where she was from. She said she was from China, on the border with Mongolia, from the Gobi Desert. A girl from the Gobi Desert, in Amsterdam, working with some guy named Kylián... I said to her, "Do that gesture again for me." Well, that's nice. And did you realize that when you were doing that, you were getting older? You were younger at the beginning and then you got older... And I got older too, all of Europe got older, the whole world and the whole universe got older..."
Everyone gathered around me and looked surprised. There was a deathly silence.
Realizing something is completely different from knowing it. Then we went through it again from the beginning, and suddenly it was something completely different. They realized the value of time. When you have that time available and you have something to say with such conviction and depth, it leaves a mark on everyone present...

Several times during the Norwegian festival, the films Car-Men, Schwarzfahrer, Scalamare and Between Entrance and Exit will be screened on a special evening. Will this also be in the theater, and will the audience see all the premiered installations at the same time?
The films will be screened on two stages at the Norwegian National Opera, and the individual installations will be available throughout the evening in the backstage area and other parts of the opera house.
These include Moving Still, sculptures set in the glass walls and windows of the theater.
Free Fall is an exhibition of photographs by Sabine (editor's note: Sabine Kupferberg, dancer, muse and wife of Jiří Kylián) and a completely new work, influenced by a Zen Buddhist symbol, will be Enso, a Japanese unfinished circle of life. A symbol of life, the circle is always slightly open and only closes after death. A rotating mirror will be an additional element. It will be necessary to reserve places there. I would like there to be only about fifteen people at a time so that everyone can concentrate in peace.

I remember Béjart's efforts and program in the 1980s to introduce and make mandatory the practice of Zen Buddhist meditation and practice at the Mudra School and the Ballet of the 20th Century in Brussels. It was an incredibly hard experience, and we also learned about the Ensu circle from Japanese masters.
Your films are a unique and personal statement that clearly reveal your sense of humor and exaggeration. Part of the public and many experts are unfamiliar with them and have no idea that you also have technical knowledge and unique inventiveness in this field. What actually brought you to film and the cinematic image?
Film has always excited me, I started doing it mainly because of Sabine. We danced together in Stuttgart with John Cranko, who told her: "You'll never be Juliet, you'll never be Tatiana, you should be an actress." And he was right, it was a prediction.
Film is fundamentally something completely different from theater. It has a different level of detail and expression. The detail of a face in a film can be two meters or more. And then film editing is very important. Editing can be used to express different meanings from the filmed material.
I shot Václav Havel's first and last film, Odcházení (Leaving). Havel was an experienced theater artist, but we had to explain some pretty fundamental things about film to him.
Of course, you know very well that I don't only do serious things. Even in serious situations, a little humour shines through here and there. Sabine and I both have a sense of humour, it's very important to us. So you'll find it in most of my films. Humour is the salt and pepper of life.

What kind of impact can a Norwegian festival have? It's actually a retrospective and undoubtedly a wonderful tribute to your work.
Do you know who's coming to the screening? Mikhail Baryshnikov, Liv Ullmann, Mats Ek with Ana Laguna... We'll all meet up and go to dinner with Sabine. It'll be a big gathering and a great honor.

I have a few questions that are not directly related to the festival. Why did you stop performing certain works after a while, such as Glagolská mše, Svatba, Zjasněná noc? Stoolgame and Stamping Ground are also rarely performed now. Or Kletby a dobrořečení by Petr Eben... That was certainly a great experiment, unforgettable for many.
That's long gone now, those big group ensembles don't mean anything to me anymore. I'm in a completely different place in my thinking about dance.

And will they just lie there in the archives and be forgotten?
For example, Psalm Mass was written much earlier than Glagolitic Mass, but it's interesting that I still see something contemporary in it. It still has something to say, it still has something to tell us. When I see it performed again, with new and much older eyes, I'm surprised by how much wisdom I see in it. Sometimes it's good to see old things with older eyes.

And The Soldier's Story or Field Mass? Both works would have something to say, especially in these troubled and war-torn times. They should be revived, shouldn't they?
You're probably right. I could see them anytime. But it's not up to me, someone would have to come and ask me to rehearse them. And of course I would agree.


It would certainly be a success and perhaps have a healing effect. Then I have perhaps my last question on the eternally recurring theme of life from birth to death. What comes after death? For you, death does not mean the end. Why are you still attracted to it?
Because it's inevitable. It's the only thing we can rely on. I've just made a film with Sabina, and I'm in it too. At the end, I say that the beauty of death is that we never disappear from here, that all the thoughts and emotions we've shared with other people live on in younger people, in other souls.
Even when we die, all the atoms and molecules become part of the universe. Our soul is bound to our body. I believe that when our body decays, it decays, but our soul will continue to exist. For me, it will be a kind of return to a foreign country...
 

Jiří Kylián was born in 1947 in Prague, where he graduated from the Prague Dance Conservatory in 1967. After a scholarship at the Royal Ballet School in London, he was engaged by John Cranko's Stuttgart Ballet from 1969 to 1975. He left Germany for the Netherlands, where he was co-director and choreographer at the Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT) in The Hague from 1975 to 1977, artistic director from 1978 to 1999, and choreographer since 1999.
In addition to the main NDT ensemble, he founded the junior NDT 2 (1978) and senior NDT 3 (1991). Jiří Kylián spent most of his creative life in The Hague, where he built one of the world's best dance companies as its director. He left an indelible mark of his exceptional talent and artistry there. He currently devotes himself to his own production, primarily visual projects, and manages the Kylián Foundation NL with its own production unit, Kylián Productions BV.
Jiří Kylián created a hundred choreographies, seventy-five of them for NDT in The Hague, and others for the Stuttgart Ballet, the Paris Opera, the Bavarian State Ballet in Munich, the Tokyo Ballet, and others. His choreographies are key works in the repertoires of all prestigious dance companies around the world. He created his last choreography, Remember Me, for the dancer and his lifelong muse Sabine Kupferberg in 2019 on the occasion of his inauguration in Paris, when he was elected a member of the French Académie des beaux-arts, the highest honor that can be bestowed in the world of art.
Jiří Kylián is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including: Commander of the Legion of Honor (France), Golden Lion (Venice), Officer of the Order of Orange (Netherlands), Honorary Doctorate from the Juilliard School in New York, an honorary doctorate from the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, three Václav Nižinský Awards (for best choreography, best ballet company and for the work One of a Kind, Monte Carlo), two Prix de Benois de la Danse, the Honorary Medal of President Václav Havel, the Medal for Arts and Sciences of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and others. In 2011, Jiří Kylián received the Czech Ministry of Culture Award for Merit in the Development of Dance and for his continuous support of Czech dance, as well as the Czech Television Award for the documentary film Forgotten Memories. In 2017, he was awarded honorary citizenship of The Hague (Netherlands) and the Positano Premia la Danza Léonide Massine for his lifetime achievement, the oldest dance award in the world. In 2024, Czech President Petr Pavel awarded Jiří Kylián the highest state honor, the Order of the White Lion.
Source: https://www.narodni-divadlo.cz/cs/profil/jiri-kylian-1594624