Ballet National de Marseille Presented METAPOLIS II (meta=beyond, polis=city, meaning “the city beyond” or “the city of the future”) At The Lincoln Center of New York City. An Artistic Event With Urban Environment Implications.

A review by Pincas Jawetz ( PJ at SustainabiliTank.com)

The Neoclassical National Ballet of Marseille is now the second most important National Ballet of France. It was created by Roland Petit who helped to put French ballet back on the map after World War II. He ran the place between 1972 and 1998. In 2004 Mr. Frederick Flamand became the new director. Ballet de Marseille was not seen in the US during the 1983 - 2007 years. Now they came to the Lincoln Center Summer Festival for a stint of three performances of their renewed Metapolis which is an honest multi-media show.

METAPOLIS is a co-production of Frederick Flamand, with London Resident, Iraq born, extremely successful architect Zaha Hadid. The first version of this collaboration dates back to 2000. Now there is the second version, it has 19 dancers compared to the first version of 11 dancers, and that is why the title says METAPOLIS II. The subject is the environmental conditions that define life in the 21st century. By reflecting the experience of the growing millions of urban dwellers and suburbanites, the show strives to give viewers an authentic snapshot of the surroundings, and possibly a vision of tomorrow.

The program credits Mr. Flamand with “Concept and Choreography,” and Ms. Hadid with “Concept and Production Design.” We would like to say that Mr. Flamand did the choreography, but Ms. Hadid did the “Mise en Scene.”
Their mind works in unison, but the props that helped this staging were the creation of Ms. Hadid, and both of them believe that dance is architecture and architecture is dance. We intend to develop this slowly, and here we want just to say that the topic being - urban life and urban environment - we found ourselves completely involved when we watched the action on stage last night. Further, we are sorry that we did not realize we should have been there Wednesday July 26, 2006, when before the Opening Performance, they held Symposium - so now I spent reading up last night and this morning, whatever I could get hold of, on about the main minds behind this piece.

Mr. Flamand, 60, had a 30 years career in Belgium. His training includes both dance and serious study of the techniques of Polish experimental director Jerzy Grotowski who was a major influence. Flamand established Belgium’s first experimental dance theater in 1979 when Maurice Bejart was king of dance. Flamand started out by working mainly in unconventional spaces: factories, swimming pools, churches … but 10 years ago, when Mr. Flamand’s company at the time, the neo-classical Charleroi/Danses in Charleroi, a small industrial town in Belgium, which he introduced to the likes of Merce Cunningham and Lucinda Childs, and when this work began gaining recognition, and he and his troupe received invitations to perform on more conventional stages, at festivals, throughout Europe, he had then to find a way to turn the stage into the unconventional space his work demanded. He did not change or compromise, his reality was his truth, and he needed now architects to help him realize his truth under these new constraints.

His luck was that he managed to bind to some of the greatest, young upward mobile modern architectural talent of the time. His collaborators sound now like a who is who of the architectural new intelligence of today and tomorrow.

Jean Nouvel, and Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofido were among his first willing partners. The latter two are part of the Diller, Scofidio & Renfro firm that are now rebuilding parts of the Lincoln Center complex - the plaza and some buildings (two new dance studios for the American Ballet have already been completed). Thom Maine, an American architect, who won the coveted Pritzker Prize in 2005, and then, for his Metapolis, Flamand landed the all too willing Zaha Hadid.

Zaha was the first female architect, ever, to win the coveted Pritzker Prize in 2004, and in the summer of 2006 she was the subject of a major retrospective at the Gugggenheim Museum in New York. Born in Baghdad, Iraq, she received a degree in mathematics from the American University of Beirut before moving to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. She graduated from the AA and got the Diploma Prize in 1977. She became a partner of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in London and taught at the AA till 1967. Then she held the Kenzo Tange Chair at Harvard, the Eero Saarinen Professorship at Yale, the Sullivan Chair at the University of Illinois School of Architecture in Chicago, guest professorships at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, the Knolton School of Architecture, Ohio, the Masters Studio at Columbia University, she is now the principal visiting professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, a honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a fellow of the American institute of Architecture, commander of the British Empire, she received the Austrian decoration of Science and Art, is a member of the Royal Academy….her concerns are how to be simultaneously involved in practice, teaching, research. She is best known for her Lois and Richard Rosenthal Centre of Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, the BMW Central Building, the Vitra Fire Station at Weil am Rhein in Germany, the Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg, Maggie’s Centre at Kirkcaldy in Scotland and a sky jump in Innsbruck, a tram station in Strasbourg, much more and many designs for products, sets and installations, now commissions come from all over the world. In Cyprus she has just finished redesigning the Platia Eleftherias Square. One current project is for the 20,000-seat Aquatics Centre for London, one of the new venues being constructed for the 2012 Summer Olympics. We found no commissions on her list from Arab countries.

When Ms. Hadid was first approached by Flamand, it was the proposal to explore the sprawling world of the “metapolis” that attracted her - the contradictions of urban life between private and public, speed and congestion, rupture and transformation, and the real and the virtual - it was the body influencing the city - it’s not only the city and the buildings that influence the body. “The body gives the city a shape.”

For Metapolis II she designed three silvery bridges made of fiberglass and aluminum, that are continuously being moved around by the dancers, sometimes creating images that you see when you travel by car or train. They continuously create new shapes and structures and are enhanced by projections on a screen and all sorts of multi media effects. The dancers move between, with, over, and under the various configurations of these bridges and there are created various continuously changing configurations - you can see center cities, suburbs, people moving in and out - you imagine it - and you see it. Amazing - it really works. Flamand said: ” we try to create with dance, and video, and structures, a space that is fluid and abrupt and has its own rhythm like a city, It’s a little like traveling in a car in the city: First its very hectic in the downtown, everyone running in business suits, then you get to Central Park and everything is calm.” He said earlier that he fell for Zaha because her “architecture is based on movement - she creates a very fluid space and continuous transformation. We wanted to make the dancers dance, of course, but to make the space dance too.”

The bold geometric costumes, run from one-legged hooded unitards to a skirt made of pillows; they serve as screens on which scenes of urban life are projected. The idea she said was to make a seamless connection among set, costumes, movement, and dancer. Using projections, the dancers bodies are mixed into the view on the screens - the dancers both - absorb the city and become actors in the urban scene.

Since Mr. Flamand’s roots were in avant-garde theater and contemporary dance, his appointment to the neo-classical Marseille Ballet came as a shock. But then, within the first year, he became a terrific success with his “La Cite Radieuse” on which he cooperated with Frenchman Dominique Perrault (also an architect).

About the dancing as such, Flamand says: “For example, in one moment the girls are on Pointe - but it’s not to make something beautiful. it’s because I feel that Zaha’s work is very much about movement as well as very sharp architecture. Pointe work is also very sharp - it’s something that really cuts space. The relationship between Zaha’s bridge and the pointe work of the girls creates a very contemporary vision. It’s not romantic or nostalgic.”

The music is provided by a collage featuring various contrasting works and then, towards the end we see a lone violinist (that is composer George van Dam) who gets on stage and plays traditional Irish music giving a very contrasting sound to the ultra-modern whizzing scene. And as we are used to say - all’s well that ends well.

In the program, the Belgian Flamand says that he feels his approach was influenced by his working with people that came from three very different cultures - Iraqi-born Zaha Hadid, American Thom Mayne, and Frenchman Dominique Perrault. He mentions here that Zaha speaks about designs that grow organically from early sketches, often inspired by Arabic calligraphy. When I talk to her about dancers breathing, she replies that architecture breathes. In her work, “I am aware of that nearly utopian longing to release construction from the laws of gravity and to break away from existing codes of discipline, two imperatives that are behind my approach.”

And some more deeper philosophy - Flamand says: “Today, the city is not only in the center - it explodes. The real cities are found outside the center. It’s part of what we call globalization, but also has a little bit to do with the Americanization of the world. It’s a certain way of living. You take the plane, you wait ten hours and you go to a motel, but it is the same motel where you have lived two days before in another city. It is an imitation.”

Now, we must end this review by saying something very corny - just think what an Iraqi woman was able to dream up and accomplish outside her country - will ever come the day that this were possible in her place of birth?
JUST THINK WHAT THE ISLAMIC WORLD HAS DONE TO ITSELF. Did Zaha get commissions from Saudi Arabia or Dubai?