Bavarian State Ballet and Bavarian State Opera present
DUO

For many dancers and 9 musicians. 

Choreography Nanine Linning
Length: ca 1 hour

Munich Opera Festival

World premiere Friday, 12. July 2019
08:00 pm
Reithalle, Munich, Germany

The Bavarian State Opera and Bavarian State Ballet commissioned Nanine Linning for a new evening length production presented by the Munich Opera Festival.
Nanine Linning, who uses the combination of dance, concert and installation to create visually stunning, poetic dance productions, is inspired by Hans Abrahamsen's chamber piece ‘Schnee’ for her choreography DUO - For 16 dancers and 9 musicians, under the direction of conductor Gregor A. Mayrhofer.

Beginning with the musical canon structure of the composition, Linning designs a world that gets to grips with the interactions of associated principles: Question and answer, chaos and structure, impulse and echo, hesitation and expectation. While above all, time ticks as endless experience.

Her choreographic structure is based on the musical structure: the music consists of ten canons. She transforms this canon structure in the form of reflections, dialogues and echoes. She encounters the constant transformation of music with a permanent regrouping of dancers. 

Together with architect and visual artist Alexandros Tsolakis, they created a stage set of two dance and video floors and the slightly lowered orchestra in the middle. The audience is placed all around the stages and experiences a very intimate evening.

Haute couture designer Irina Shaposhnikova designed costumes based on the structure of sound waves, transforming echoes into 3-D cutted and layered dresses, jackets and pants.

Hans Abrahamsen has been writing music on the snow theme for many years now, surrounded by terms such as “winter and transience, fairy tales and dreams”; his chamber orchestra piece Schnee (2006–2008) forms the centrepiece of a body of work that will mark a new highpoint with the premiere of his first opera, The Snow Queen, in winter 2019 at the Bavarian State Opera. 

The Press on DUO - for many dancers and 9 musicians:

"Frenetically acclaimed ballet premiere .."
Süddeutsche Zeitung

"Duo - for many dancers and 9 musicians, which in its enormous quality completely escapes a category like" modern ". Rather, "duo", regardless of times and fashions, provides an intense synaesthetic experience as a moving dialogue of sounds and bodies."
Süddeutsche Zeitung

"Linning picks up on the formal requirements and yet sets her own images against it, visualizes sound waves in wave movements, an effect that the black and white skirts from the 3D printer by Irina Shaposhnikova emphasize. The dancers evoke a very pure, existential experience of a community, which also involves the public."
Süddeutsche Zeitung

“Exceptional season ending”
"The soundscape of the Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen, shaped by nature and landscapes, in the Munich Reithalle, with its archaic spaciousness, is both an impressive and intimate choreographic experience."

"Rarely has the cyclical nature been so atmospherically captured in a unity of music and choreography. A great production, that makes intimicy and distance tangible from a single point of view."
Tanznetz.de