Skip to main content"Every sound has its own form, its own weight and definition," stressed Spanish dance maker Nacho Duato by telephone last week. "The ballet is already there in the music; you just have to look for it." What composer, past or present, could ask for a better avowal from their dance interpreter? Duato will test his methodology in movement next Tuesday, when his company, Spain's Compañia Nacional de Danza, performs his celebrated evening-length work Bach: Multiplicity.
A Spanish Adonis from Valencia who was bitten by the ballet bug at the advanced age of 17, Duato honed his skills in Jiri Kylian's Nederlands Dans Theater during the 1980s. Neo-classicist Kylian's penchant for deconstructed classical movement laid the groundwork for his pupil Duato's fiercely sensual yet accessible work. After creating pieces for a laundry list of prestigious dance companies including the American Ballet Theater and Stuttgart Ballet, Duato finally headed home in 1990, taking over the reins of the Compañia Nacional de Danza. The personality injection and brand-new repertoire with works by Mats Ek and Ohad Naharin rocketed the once-anonymous 30-member company to the top of the international dance scene.
In terms of pure movement, it's difficult to do much else than praise the brilliance of Duato and his chorus of serpentine angels: dancers who defy not only gravity, but the very logic of the human body's nervous, skeletal and muscular systems at will. Portland audiences had a taste of Duato's beatific, top-speed fluidity when the Lyon Opera Ballet performed his García Lorca-inspired Remansos last May. But with Bach, an abstract homage to the musical work and life of 18th-century German composer Johann Sebastian Bach, Duato and his company have reached a new level by striving to highlight both a man and a musical legacy through dance.
"In Germany, Bach is a god," Duato explains of the work, which was a 1999 commission from Bach's onetime home of Weimar. "A Spaniard doing two hours of his music was a very dangerous idea because I react to Bach in a more passionate manner than, perhaps, someone from the North would, where it would come out more intellectual." Duato's passion has been translated to the stage as an ever-shifting dance collage where the lone figure of Bach acts as the central link in a chain of disparate musical and biographical encounters with the Compañia, (many centered on the composer's obsession with death).
"I was so afraid of misusing Bach's genius," Duato admits. "I think that sometimes human beings shouldn't touch works like these, we should just listen to them. I do little Hitchcock appearances on stage," he says, referring to his pair of solos that open and close the evening in which the choreographer himself engages Bach in a short pas de deux. "At the beginning, it's my way of asking him permission as well as his forgiveness for my being so stupid."
Filled with fencing matches, auguries of death and a 30-piece human orchestra, Duato's eye-catching program finds glory in an unending procession of duets, trios and groups whose powers seize the monumental bulk of a master to produce a biography in movement.
White Bird at the Keller Auditorium, 222 SW Clay St., 224-4400. 7:30 pm Tuesday, Nov. 19. $18-$39.
Choreographer Nacho Duato studied classical ballet at London's Rambert School, Maurice Bejart's Mudra and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater during the late 1970s.
Duato's Bach includes selections from some of the composer's most beloved works, including Art of the Fugue, Concerto for Two Violins and his Brandenburg Concertos.
The Bach set, a towering scaffold of curtains and iron designed by Jaffar Al Chalabi in conjunction with Duato, was created as an architectural conception of Baroque music.
"A Spaniard doing two hours of his music was a very dangerous idea because I react to Bach in a more passionate manner than, perhaps, someone from the North would."
WWeek 2015