When the wilderness becomes a stage

Nature always plays a role in opera, theatre and ballet as a prop, as a backdrop, as papier-mâché staffage. But apart from the natural stages of the Baroque era, it is rare to hear authentic rustling leaves and birdsong during a performance, or for actors and spectators to run the risk of falling into a stream or impaling themselves on a sharp branch. However, this is precisely the danger that Xing Peng Wang faces in September when preparing the piece «In the Forest»: In the basin of a small stream in the wilderness of the Bavarian Forest National Park, young artists from the Bavarian Junior Ballet Munich try out the figures and combinations devised by Wang.

A steep slope with fallen, mossy trees becomes a grandstand. The spectators, including Ivan Liška, artistic director of the Bavarian Junior Ballet Munich and chairman of the Heinz Bosl Foundation, forest guide Julia Freund and Lukas Laux, head of environmental education at the national park, watch the spectacle in amazement and fascination. Sitting, or rather crouching, in the audience is Maya von Ahnen, a recent graduate of a Master’s programme within the new Munich University Chair of Environmental Humanities. The aim of this degree programme is to link the broad field of humanities with the natural and environmental sciences. Research into human nature, with its aspirations and abysses, meets the latest findings on the fascinating and harassed nature of the natural world. “Ballet and Wilderness” thus symbolises a mutual broadening of horizons.

The project began in 2004 as a collaboration between the Bavarian State Ballet under the direction of Ivan Liška and the Bavarian Ministry of the Environment under State Minister Werner Schnappauf. At the end of the 2015/2016 season, the collaboration will be continued by the Heinz Bosl Foundation and the Bavarian Junior Ballet, also with the Ministry of the Environment as a proven partner.

The unconventional co-operation was officially launched in July 2004 with a series of performances of pieces by young choreographers from the Bavarian State Ballet on a specially constructed open-air stage in the Bavarian Forest National Park. Since then, the project has had an incredible career: performances, mostly with excursions, have taken place in the Bavarian Forest and Berchtesgaden National Parks, at the Federal Garden Show in Munich, in the Weltenburger Weltenburger Enge Nature Park, in the Czech Šumava National Park and most recently at Andechs Monastery. As an exhibition, short film and lecture, “Ballet and Wilderness” has even travelled to Mexico, Alaska and Estonia, and of course to Ivan Liska’s birthplace, Prague. In 2010, 2014 and 2018, “Ballet and Wilderness” was honoured as an “Outstanding Project of the UN Decade on Biodiversity” and in 2017 Liška was awarded the “Bavarian State Medal for Environmental Merit”.

So much for the brief history of the scene that is now unfolding in a basin in the Bavarian wilderness. Although the choreographer originally intended seven men for the piece, women are now also allowed to dance in it. In this way, according to Ivan Liška, the whole troupe should “release the instincts with which we are endowed by nature”.  This is exactly what choreographer Xing Peng Wang had in mind when he celebrated the “creaturely subconscious” in his work «In the Forest», “which always manages to escape our attempts at civilisation”.

Filip Janda, dancer and participant in the 2007 “Ballet and Wilderness” project, now at the National Theatre in Prague, says with remarkable philosophical depth: “Everyone carries a piece of wilderness within them. Our instincts are suppressed by modern civilisation. But the more we suppress them, the harder we try to revive them. The great outdoors recharges me with its power, but also makes me realise my limits. You can’t live or dance without nature.”

Claudine Schoch, project veteran from 2005 and now first solo dancer at the Vienna State Ballet, says: “To be convincing on stage, I have to push myself to my limits. This requires a lot of discipline, but also wildness, even aggression. In music, as in the wilderness, there is much that cannot be grasped with the mind. Both music and wilderness are supernatural for me.”

It remains to be seen whether these are the primal instincts that the artists of the Bayerisches Jugend Ballett München are now releasing amidst some cheering and laughter: In any case, the young people clearly enjoy being able to realise what they have rehearsed in the studio in the middle of the wild Lower Bavarian forest. Firstly, the men on the banks of the stream begin to move rhythmically up and down with short but deep and wide pliés, throwing their upper bodies back and then grabbing each other with their hands and taking turns to push each other overhead in quick lifts. This is followed by the women, who question the harmonies of classical ballet with edgy, erratic movements and cheerful laughter.

During one of the quick lifts, apparently a trademark of the piece, one of the dancers, Rebecca Rudolf, is lifted onto a mossy tree trunk where, balancing her legs in a wide fifth position, she directs her gaze in obvious rapture towards the sky and the early autumn canopy with a lyrical cambré derrière (backward bend).

Shortly beforehand, however, the young Romanian was anything but enchanted by the wilderness. As the group (16 dancers from 13 nations) ascended along the treetop path, she was gripped by a fear of heights and, having reached the top at a height of over forty metres, had to deal with a swarm of winged ants that were preparing to settle in her hair on their late summer wedding flight.

A few hours later, all unpleasantness is forgotten. Perhaps this is due to the guided hikes over the mostly unpaved terrain of a seemingly untouched, unspoilt forest, which provide the artists’ bodies with a concert of physical and psychological stimuli.  

Perhaps it’s because of the many stories that the two experts Julia Freund and Lukas Laux know how to tell, for example that the wild forest of the national park was anything but untouched in the past, that the original Lower Bavarians not only harvested wood here, but also dug for gold and processed mushrooms into all kinds of useful things for people, such as hats, clothing and cooker lighters.

But mushrooms are much more useful for the forest. As the dancers are amazed to learn, the fungi decompose the autumn leaves and thus obtain the sugar produced by the trees through photosynthesis. The fungi return the favour to the trees by docking onto the fine root system of the trees with kilometre-long connecting lines, the so-called mycorrhiza, where they provide phosphorus and nitrogen. The exchange of substances also helps the trees to communicate with each other and over long distances.

But sometimes the best underground supply and communication system is useless if death strikes the forest in the form of tiny, swarming bark beetles. From a purely reproductive biological point of view, the motto for the little beetles every summer is “Love is in the Air”. Guided by scents and sex hormones, the beetles create so-called “collecting chambers” under the bark of spruce trees damaged by global warming in order to reproduce there. The mass death of the trees caused by the mating insects is tolerated by the national park managers, who are committed to the nationwide national park motto “Let nature be nature”. And for good reason: with their voracious love life, the small beetles open up food sources and habitats for wood-eating insects, but also for wood-decaying fungi, birds and small mammals. After a few years, the decaying giant trees made way for the regrowing, vital and species-rich young forest. Love is in the air. Death is in the Air. Life is in the Air.

On some of the excursions, stage costumes are brought along so that the dancers can be staged by Nuremberg photographer Berny Meyer. Some photos are also taken on the initiative of the artists. Lisa Maree-Cullum, for many years the first soloist of the Bavarian State Ballet, wades into a forest pond in a precious sequinned swan lake costume, unannounced and as if nothing were more natural, so that the photographer and lighting technician (the writer of these lines) have a hard time keeping up with the equipment).

In Cullum’s case, there is a very special reason why a prima ballerina, who often has to impress with her delicacy on stage, is so confident in the wilderness. “I grew up in Papua New Guinea,” she reveals. “As a little girl, I experienced the jungle there almost like the primeval forest in the Bavarian Forest. I felt reminded of my youth. We used to bring all sorts of creepy-crawlies home and I used to walk around outside barefoot as often as I could, even in the rainforest. Wilderness also reminds me of the freedom of childhood.”

A few marvellous scenes, a few beautiful stories: But let’s ask heretically; what’s the point of it all? The question must be allowed and has often been asked. Goethe’s much-quoted aphorism: “Nature and art, they seem to flee from each other, and before you know it, they have found each other”, doesn’t really help here. What artistic and social added value is generated by “Ballet & Wilderness”?

In a declaration of intent between the Ministry of the Environment and the Heinz Bosl Foundation from 2018, “Ballet and Wilderness” is described as an “artistic representation of the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of experiencing nature in process protection habitats (wilderness)”. “This gives the project an overall social dimension”. And the declaration of intent continues: “The project partners refer to a line of tradition that, with ballets such as «Giselle» (1841), «Swan Lake» (1877) but also «Afternoon of a Faun» (1912), makes the boundaries between the natural realm and the human world more permeable, a realisation that was brought into circulation in scientific form by Charles Darwin in 1859. These basic ideas were also the inspiration for the “Ballet and Wilderness” project.

But how can “the boundaries between the natural kingdom and the human world be made more permeable” in this relationship? Such things are quickly written down, but ultimately remain obscure. There is relevant research. American scientists (Vucetich et al, 2008) conclude that the “concept of a physical wilderness is fundamentally important for understanding the relationship between human society and the environment”. One conclusion from the article is that a certain distance from civilisation enables an empathic focus on the non-human actors of the wilderness and this can help to overcome the divide between humans and nature. The refocusing through the shared physical and aesthetic experience of wilderness strengthens both the change of perspective on the big picture, as well as group cohesion, empathy and empathy for one another.  

After a first excursion, including an overnight stay in the national park’s wilderness camp, dancer (and husband of Cullum) Vincent Loermans enthuses: “Wilderness is something very special. I suddenly realise that we have become accustomed to so many things that are luxuries that we absolutely don’t need. In the city, we imagine we need this and that. It’s a great experience to realise how little we need to be truly happy.”

An indication of the dissolution of the boundaries between the natural realm and the human world can be found in the text accompanying the piece “Im Wald” on the youth ballet’s website. Using the music of the accompanying orchestral piece “Vajrayӑna” by the French composer Camille Pépin as an example, it speaks of a “connection between the microcosm of the human body and the macrocosm of the universe”. Claudine Schoch’s statement that music and wilderness are particularly similar in their supernatural nature comes to mind again.

A slightly different approach emerges from the university course “Christian Environmental Ethics”, a compulsory elective subject within the Environmental Humanities. According to Markus Vogt, who teaches “Christian Environmental Ethics” in Munich and wrote the standard work of the same name, a “decisive innovation in environmental ethics” is the “spatial turn”, the “spatial ethical approach”, which “goes beyond merely wanting to protect individual objects in nature with care and instead enables it to rediscover space more existentially as a field of reference for ethics”.  

Lukas Laux, who has accompanied and supported the project from the outset, emphasises a pragmatic benefit that played a key role in the launch of the project: “We can reach new target groups through the performances and exhibitions. The Munich cultural audience learns what wilderness means, and the local Bavarian residents have the opportunity to get to know high culture from the state capital. So ballet and wilderness as a kind of public relations show for nature and culture with mutual benefits? Karl-Friedrich Sinner, acting director of the national park at the start of the project, comments on the first photographic results of the project: “The pictures are an excellent message of the national park idea. Although our motto is ‘Let nature be nature’, people and their relationship with nature are always at the centre of our work. 

Twenty years later, Maya von Ahnen substantiates the visionary statement made by the National Park Director in 2004 with regard to the new “Environmental Humanities” degree programme, saying: “People’s relationship with nature clearly calls for a readjustment, a constant review. Von Ahnen, who herself has some experience in ballet and semi-professional modern dance, asked around in the industry and came across the so-called “multispecies dancing” of the avant-garde group “Loup”, which is about “dancing in the presence of other organisms, not transforming into them or imitating them, but presenting yourself to them, dancing because of them.”

In this way, says Von Ahnen, “there is a very radical reversal, for a short time the ecosystem is the reason for us humans, for us dancers, to be in the world.” She is alluding to the idea of “ecosystem services”, which the United Nations often emphasises, according to which the value of ecosystems is calculated according to their long-term economic value for people. Multispecies Dancing asks instead, what can we do for the other (wild) world around us? How can we maintain this world in both senses of the word?

Aldo Leopold, an American forest scientist and writer who is considered one of the early pioneers of the environmental humanities, wrote in the 1940s: “I dare say that few conservationists have any intention or desire to contribute to art and literature, yet the ecological dramas we discover when we try to care for the animal and plant world are in no way inferior to the human drama as a subject for the visual arts. Isn’t it a little pathetic that poets and musicians have to deal with hackneyed mythologies and folklore as a medium for art and ignore the dramas of ecology and evolution?”

How the “dramas of ecology and evolution” can be realised artistically and choreographically will be the subject of a workshop with Maya von Ahnen and the Bavarian Youth Ballet next year. Of course, it remains to be seen whether this can one day become a wilderness choreography of its own or even a “key work”, as optimistically declared in the declaration of intent between the Ministry of the Environment and the Heinz Bosl Foundation.

In any case, a start has been made. At the end of the excursion, Lukas Laux hands out bright green wilderness notebooks in which some of the dancers write down their impressions. Perhaps the most detailed and poetic comments come from Rebecca Rudolf, the dancer who experienced a particular rollercoaster of emotions in the Bavarian wilderness:

 

In the Forest

Through the apple of your eyes, I see,
Thousand spirits coming from the trees,
Spirits leading me to nature,
To the natural instincts of our love,
Love that grows from fern to alpines,
Love that keeps the world going on.

Steps through the wildness of the forest,
Let the leaf litter spread its secrets,
Alike mushrooms, over thousands are existent,
Peaceful sounds of rivers flowing,
That the bears would like to listen.

Coloured berries, mud and fog,
And the owls with their wisdom,
Virgin plants and stones unstepped,
Left behind, the trip has come to an end.

You look at me as I put flowers in your hair,
We reconnect as new personas,
Greater is the Love we share.

 

 

Literature:
John A. Vucetich and Michael P. Nelson: Distinguishing Experiential and Physical Conceptions of Wilderness (2008)
Loup Rivière: Dancing is an Ecosystem Service, and so is being Trans (2022)