Three Voices, One Common Ground: Music by Carl Maria von Weber, Richard Wagner, and Heitor Villa-Lobos
“You have to love dancing to stick with it. It gives you nothing in return … except that one
fleeting moment when you feel alive.”
Merce Cunningham
Roots brings together three choreographic styles that stem from different artistic traditions yet share a common foundation: classical ballet. In this three-part ballet evening, the works of Marco Goecke, Cayetano Soto, and Jonathan dos Santos come together in an open dialogue between tradition and the present.
In *Le Spectre de la Rose*, Marco Goecke draws on Weber’s romantic music to develop a contemporary movement language that is deeply rooted in classical technique while simultaneously reexamining it.
For this evening, Cayetano Soto has created a piece set to Wagner’s “Lohengrin” Prelude, which charts a light-filled journey and presents the ensemble with major physical and creative challenges.
Jonathan dos Santos draws inspiration from the *Bachianas Brasileiras* to further interweave classical and contemporary dance—including through work on pointe.
Accompanied by the Mecklenburg-Schwerin State Orchestra, ballet is experienced here as a living art form—defined by discipline, line, and technique, yet open to individual forms of expression. “Roots” describes not so much a fixed theme as a unifying idea—a thread that runs through three works and leaves room for the audience to draw their own associations.
