The opening of the 2024 Season of Colon Theater It will be with one of the most celebrated works of Argentine dance: Carmina Burana. With choreography, script and staging by Mauricio Wainrotand throughout eleven performances, the scenic cantata that Carl Orff imagined in 1935, will summon the Coro Estable, the Children’s Choir and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Buenos Aires live, to accompany the Ballet Estable of the Teatro Colón.
Put
Have passed 25 years since Wainrot created his version of Carmina Burana, in 1998, for the Royal Ballet of Flanders. She premiered it three years later in Argentina with the Contemporary Ballet of the San Martín Theater, which she directed for more than a decade. But for the first time in more than 15 versions of it, it will have the different artistic bodies of the Teatro Colón together, something that Wainrot celebrates with joy today at 78 years old. The choreographer also has the scenery and costumes of the remembered Carlos Gallardo, the graphic artist with whom he worked on countless projects. “He was the creator of the Graphic Design degree at the UBA,” Wainrot emphasizes in the talk with NOTICIAS in the bustling dining room of the Teatro Colón, through which dozens of dancers, musicians and technicians parade. Toupe that the choreographer commands like a technical director. “Not technical director, artistic director, but I am a fan of football and the work of some managers like Pep Guardiola,” says Wainrot.
The same taste for assembling teams stands out, the group contribution of the choir and the ballet corps to highlight certain moments of the work, and the interspersing of proven professionals with novices to see their faculties exploit. “It happened yesterday at a rehearsal with one of the dancers who I had given the lead role in one of Carmina’s scenes. The third time she managed it, finding the spirit of the character, and it was sublime,” he celebrates. He enjoys rehearsals more, he admits, than performances, but he refuses to be that choreographer who tears his hair out over his dancers’ mistakes on stage. “I take note of everythingbut to adjust and improve,” he says.
The work
Carmina Burana Carl Orff It is probably the most performed choral work of the 21st century. The name has Latin roots: “Carmina” means songs, while “Burana” is the Latinized form of Beuren, the name of the Benedictine monastery where they were discovered in 1803 (although it has since been established that the collection originated in Seckau Abbey, Austria) a collection of songs and poems from the early 13th century, written in a mixture of Latin, German and medieval French by the Goliardsa group of scholars and clerical students, who celebrated the most banal joys with earthly humor.
The collection was first published in Germany in 1847, but it was not until 1934 that Orff found the texts, chose 24 songs, and set them to music. The famous opening chorus, “O Fortuna, velut Luna” (Oh Fortune, like the moon), refers to the whims of fate. Returning in full at the end, he gives the work a dramatic framework, in which other poems are interspersed, dealing with the fleeting joys of spring (Primo Vera), the tavern (In Taberna) and erotic love (Cour d’amours ). Wainrot explains the above with simple erudition. And a student of Orff’s work, its process and historical framework, he lights up when asked about the link between the work and its author with Nazism.
Context
Orff’s masterpiece greatly attracted the Nazi regime, whose rhythms, as one critic endorsed, reminded him of the “stamping columns of the Third Reich.” And when Carmina Burana was first performed at La Scala in 1942, it was celebrated as a masterpiece of fascist values. Since then, its most famous fragments have been resignified by the film industry, which used them countless times from the 1981 “Excalibur” (with Helen Mirren and Liam Neeson), through twenty popular commercials. “I don’t think Carmina has anything fascist,” says Wainrot. before giving a history lesson that extends from the Nazi cultural program and the Third Reich’s fascination with Wagner (which the choreographer refuses to listen to), to the years of the trial in Argentina. He connects with his own story: he staged “Anna Frank” at the San Martín Theater two years after the return of democracy.
“The terrible fate of the eight people who lived together, exiled in the small annex of a building in Amsterdam, for more than two years under the worst fascist regime that has ever existed,” summarizes Wainrot, who He presented the show 17 times and all over the world: with the English National Ballet (London), at the Gothenburg Opera (Sweden), with the Royal Ballet of Wallonie (Belgium), the Wiesbaden Opera Ballet and the Hildesheim Ballet (both in Germany), among others. The review brings up the memory of her own childhood, of the Sundays of that family of Polish Jewish immigrants in Argentina, a heritage decimated by the Holocaust.
Season
“After the war Orff emigrated to the United States, and created one of the most used school music teaching systems in the world,” Wainrot, a scholar, points out. And Orff’s Carmina Burana is also Wainrot’s Carmina Burana, with a quarter of a century of zealous personal maceration, to which are added the current implications of a new wave of antisemitism, but also the celebration of life that the Goliardos cantata proposes. A chorus in which the famous Argentine choreographer finds the fuel to remain intensely active after countless tours around the world: although he no longer travels as much because he misses his apartment and the comfort of his own pillow.
Thus, the Fortune of Carmina Buranawhich will be repeated with functions between March 12 and 27, is the beginning of a season curated by Jorge Telerman and team, in which the Ballet gains strength: Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty” is scheduled to be seen in June, with choreography by Mario Galizzi and Marianela Núñez (from the Royal Ballet of London) as a guest dancer; “Giselle” in October (with choreography by Gustavo Mollajoli); and “La Bayadera” for the closing of 2024, with choreography by Galizzi and Kimin Kim as first dancer. A list to which the CETC productions are added: “Mirlitons” in May (by François Chaignaud and Aymeric Hainaux); a set of works by Scottish choreographer Billy Cowie, “Solos Extr3mos,” in September; and “Materials under construction” by choreographer Ana Gurbanov in November and December.
by RN
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