Steve Reich's energetic and moving piece for percussion, with it highly associative title "Drumming Part 1", was inspired by percussion rituals in Ghana. Jiri Kylian shapes an energetic, tumultuous action to it. Sice the rituals of the West Africans are always accompanied by dances, the choreography supplements this essential component to complete the piece of music. In Kylian's view, the drums evoke dreams, and so he gives his imagination free rein in this piece. It wanders through the changing rythms and primitive African beat, producing an extremely exciting dance. In Falling Angels, the 8 female dancers are also influenced by lighting. long, bright stripes are drawn and held fast in the shadows of the darkened stage. Between these stripes, a series of heads appears and vanishes again, then a sequence of crossed arms. The strict beauty of the movement of arms and torsi is breathtaking. Like the music, the lighting here underscores the structure of the choreography, accentuating its construction and proceeding, a characteristic always to be found in Kylian's work. The piece is performes with a hellish brio by 8 women in grey costumes and small white shoes, which are accented by their carefully rolled-down socks. The dancers plunge into the vortex of Steve Reich's music, whose repeated minimalistic rhythms accelerate steadily, developing a highly emphatic power.

Source: Arthaus Musik

DVD AVAILABLE AT ARTHAUS MUSIK: arthaus-musik.com/

The world-renowned choreographer Jiří Kylián (Czechoslovakia, 1947) has been artistic director and house choreographer for of Nederlands Dans Theater for more than thirty years. Throughout his career Kylián created 75 choreographies for NDT. The piece  "Mémoires d’Oubliettes" marked the end of his work for NDT in 2009. Since then his creative focus has shifted to more small scale projects. Kylián created various other pieces for companies worldwide such as the Stuttgart Ballet, the Paris Opéra, the Munich Bayerisches Staatsballett and the Tokyo Ballet. Kylián received many prestigious, international awards and honours.

Jiří Kylián started his dance career at the age of nine, at the School of the National Ballet in Prague. In 1962 he was accepted as a student at the Prague Conservatory. He left Prague in 1967 when he received a scholarship for the Royal Ballet School in London.  Then he left for the Stuttgart Ballet led by John Cranko, where he made his debut as a choreographer with Paradox for the Noverre Gesellschaft. After having created three ballets for NDT ("Viewers", "Stoolgame" and "La Cathédrale Engloutie"), he became the company’s artistic director in 1975 together with Hans Knill. During the 1978 Charleston Festival in the United States  Kylián put NDT on the international map with Sinfonietta (Leoš Janácek). That year he and Carel Birnie founded NDT 2, which was – and is – meant to offer young dancers the opportunity to develop their skills and talents. In 1991 he initiated NDT 3; a company that created opportunities for ‘older’ dancers. NDT stood out as the first company worldwide that showed the three dimensions of a dancer´s life. After an extraordinary record of service Kylián handed over the artistic leadership in 1999, but remained associated to the dance company as house choreographer until 2009.

Source: Nederlands Dance Theater 's website

More information: ndt.nl/en/home.html

Arthaus Musik is a label for classical music on DVD and Blu-ray. The company belongs to Studio Halle GmbH and maintains the subsidiary Monarda Arts.
Arthaus Musik GmbH was founded in Munich in March 2000 and has been based in Halle (Saale) since 2007. The  label has been publishing records of operas, ballets, classical  concerts, jazz, theater productions and selected documentaries on music  and the arts for thirteen years. Since then, over 700 titles have been released on DVD and Blu-ray with up to 100 releases per year.
Among  the publications are recordings with artists such as Plácido Domingo,  Cecilia Bartoli, Luciano Pavarotti, Maria Callas, Jonas Kaufmann,  Burkard Schliessmann and conductors, such as Carlos Kleiber, Claudio  Abbado, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Lorin Maazel, Pierre Boulez and Zubin  Mehta. The  recordings come from opera houses such as La Scala, the Vienna State  Opera, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, the Opéra National de Paris  and the Zurich Opera House.

More information: arthaus-musik.com/