Czech National Ballet's Sarcasms ends in Katastrof, but fortunately no disaster happens

After a long time, this year's Sarcasms brings to the composite evening an idea that goes beyond the framework of “people who have passed through a particular ensemble and/or country,” striving for opinion, which is both surprising and gratifying after previous experiences. It does so by selecting works by Hans van Manen, whom Prague audiences last saw last year in Beyond Vibrations, Andrej Kajdanovsky, who presented his work as part of Slavic Temperament in 2018, and Eyal Dadon, known for his triptych bpm, which premiered three years ago, and also thanks to last year's guest appearance by the choreographer's SOL Dance Company.

The selection of Kajdanovskij, a native of Russia who has lived and worked in Austria for many years, and Dadon, an Israeli, has another dimension in 2025: it can serve as a social commentary, a picture of the times, or a political statement, and from this perspective, it may ultimately appear more sophisticated than a program composed of, say, Jooss's Green Table, Shechter's Political Mother and Crystal Pite's The Statement. Bridging the gap with caustic sarcasm, which will always balance between subtle irony and crude cynicism, has potential in any case and, at least on paper, shows promise.

The evening opens with Kajdanovsky's new work ...And How Is Your Life? The half-hour one-act piece begins as the audience enters the auditorium, with Willie Johnson's banjo strumming from behind the curtain, whose composition is a kind of unifying red thread binding the choreography into a whole. Otherwise, however, Kajdanovský's work is a musically eclectic madness combining everything that came to hand, and although during the second premiere it seemed that the individual compositions flowed together more organically, I still couldn't shake the feeling of a clip-like episodicity roughly in the style of Rococo opera-ballets. This is reinforced by the lighting design (Christian Kass) and the scenography, which shows the approach of an enthusiastic child in a candy store who wanted shadow play and strobe lights, light cutouts, ballet flooring stretched across the orchestra pit and raised to the back of the stage...

Put simply, the theme of the work is the struggle between emotions and social norms, but it is approached in an extremely naive, literal way, using clumsy metaphors and clichés in the form of shapeless, uniform white coats and brightly colored leotards (costumes and set design by Karoline Hogl). According to psychologist Robert Plutchik, at the center of the action are eight basic emotions—expectation, self-confidence, fear, surprise, sadness, hostility, anger, and joy—which the choreographer feels the need to present at length, yet he is unable to distinguish them sufficiently in terms of movement (something that George Balanchine, for example, managed without any problem almost eighty years ago in his Four Temperaments or even Pixar's Inside Out). If we ignore anger, whose representative Kristina Kornová in a red corset (how surprising) has the task of growling on stage (yes, really) and angrily throwing her coat around... You will only discover that you have been watching animosity with delight in the female duet between Kristýna Němečková and Alexandra Perou after you look at the list of performers and the cast during the intermission. So when the author asks how life is going, after seeing the performance twice, I answer that personally, it's not going very well.


The second half of the triple bill belongs first to the duet, or rather trio, Sarcasmen by Hans van Manen for a woman, a man, and a piano (in the first premiere, the energetic Anna McBride sat at the piano, in the second, the emphatic Tomáš Pindór). The choreographer focuses on the developing relationship between the dancers, but does not view it through the expected romantic, dreamy lens or with implied romantic tension, but rather with humour and mocking commentary. The male dancer shows off and clowns around in front of his partner (in which Erivan Garioli stood out on the second evening with his immediacy, surpassing Paul Irmatov from the first premiere), while she watches him with annoyance and ostentatious boredom (the absolutely textbook Romina Contreras, slightly less convincing on the second day Haruka Iguchi). They then swap roles, playing with gender norms and provoking each other. The long neoclassical lines of their bodies in simple, form-fitting costumes (the female dancer is dressed in a black leotard with a short skirt, the male dancer in black leggings, white socks, and ballet shoes) are broken up by flexed feet, and Manen's tense, wide V-shaped arms are a matter of course.

Forty-five years ago, the work was likely to cause quite a stir, disrupting established stage conventions and sharply poking at the traditions of depicting heteronormative relationships on the dance stage. In 2025, I was much more struck by the caricatured portrayal of gender stereotypes, which I did not find particularly pleasant. The relationship between the male and female dancers is, at least according to the dramaturgical introduction before the performance, a reflection of everyday life in a relationship, with which the audience can easily identify and find amusement. I will leave the assessment to those more experienced, as I am not in a position to contribute anything relevant to the debate from this point of view. On the other hand, if van Manen really did capture and amplify the clichés of the relationship and roles of men and women, he did not convince me of the social experiment called cohabitation.


After van Manen, it was Eyal Dadon's turn, who began his Katastrof in an unconventional way. Twenty-three dancers slowly gathered on the open stage, and while stage equipment flashed behind them and new ballet tape was being applied, they hummed the central musical theme of the opus being played on the proscenium with their legs dangling into the orchestra pit. Fortunately, the catastrophe of some of the less tone-deaf individuals was not too pronounced (although still clearly audible), and was drowned out by the excellent singing of Elena Dombrowski, who during the choreography also took the microphone for a moment in a makeshift rock band set up at the back of the stage, where her fellow dancers played the piano, drums, and electric guitars. Dadon, himself a dancer and musician, took advantage of the multitalented Prague ensemble, but movement still had the final say.

It has become a kind of maddening cliché that Israeli dance has something unique about it, a kind of unrepeatability and inevitable Israeli-ness. When Dadon first appeared with the National Theater Ballet, expectations in this regard were not entirely fulfilled. His ARTZA at the time struggled with similar problems of excessive descriptiveness, as Kajdanovskij does this time. However, Katastrof is a completely different story. Its movement vocabulary is raw, full of expressive, meaningful gestures, dynamic rhythms, and powerful energy pulsing through the entire black-clad ensemble (costumes by Bregje van Balen). Moreover, it seems that Dadon is the only one who understood the assignment and the central theme of the triptych, namely sarcasm (and anyone who saw his company's guest performance last season and remembers the unique concept of the closing credits will not be surprised, only delighted). The work constantly winks ironically, with a sneer, it knows how to poke fun with movement sequences (sometimes reminiscent of clapping sea lions, sometimes swaying penguins, sometimes vibrating plastic animals on the dashboard of a car driving along the D1 motorway), as well as with the voiceover, it plays, is not afraid of black humor, and knows how to laugh bitterly and send chills down your spine. Recurring themes in the second half may suggest that there is more behind the grimaces and sarcastic remarks. That the situation is actually more serious. However, the work never takes itself too seriously, thus retaining its freedom of interpretation. Do you want to take from it hope for a common solution to future problems? Please do. Would you rather cynically snort and dive into the darkness of nihilism with a wry smile? As you wish!

The dancers themselves, of course, play a major role in the wonderful experience of Katastrof, managing to create an exceptionally compact, focused ensemble. I cannot name everyone, but I must mention the absolutely outstanding Anna Novotná in a small solo, in which she demonstrates her long-standing qualities and individuality in the contemporary repertoire, Mathias Deneux, Romina Contreras, and Patrik Holeček as the most convincing incarnation of the aforementioned penguin.



After a relatively long time, the sarcasm thus becomes a largely positive experience, and if the PR team intends to target the program at a young audience that will try to attract them to dance at the National Theatre, it can only be said with pleasure that this is a much more successful attempt than in the case of the previous bpm, and a visit is recommended. Completely without irony.
 

Written from the first and second premieres on April 24 and 25, 2025, National Theater, Prague.

Sarcasms

...And How Is Your Life?
Choreography: Andrej Kajdanovskij
Music: Bow Wow Wow, Blind Willie Johnson, John Medeski, North Mississippi Allstars & Robert Randolph, Django Reinhardt, Figueroa & Amon Tobin, Deru, Appart, Mike Duke, Blake Newman, Amy Denio, Andy Pinkham, David Maxwell, Will Dowd, Ken Field, Mike Rivard, Phil Neighbors & Jessica Lurie, Ben Frost
Music and sound design: Christoph Kirschfink
Costumes and scenography: Karoline Hogl
Lighting design: Christian Kass
Video projection: Clemens Purner

Sarcasmen
Choreography, costumes and stage design: Hans van Manen
Music: Sergei Prokofiev (Sarcasms, Op. 17)
Lighting design: Bert Dalhuysen

Katastrof
Choreography, sound design, stage: Eyal Dadon
Creative collaboration: Tamar Barlev
Music: Gil Nemet, Eyal Dadon
Costumes: Bregje van Balen
Lighting design: Felice Ross