 | REPERTOIRE Forgotten Land |
Choreography: Jirí Kylián
Music: Benjamin Britten (Sinfonía de Réquiem, opus 20)
Decor and Costumes: John Macfarlane Light desing: Joop Caboort
Staging: Roslyn Anderson
World premiere by the Stuttgart Ballet on 12th april, 1981. Premiered by Compañía Nacional de Danza at Teatro Madrid, on 22nd april 1993.
Kylián, in comparison to Britten, sees Simfonia da Requiem as a work of more personal character than a political one, for it is always people who determine the political scene. It is always people and nature who turn the wheel of evolution a little further. East Anglia, a coastline of England slowly submerging under the sea, is the birthplace of Benjamin Britten. The image of land taken over by the sea - together with a painting by Eduard Munch - became the primary inspiration for the choreography of Forgotten Land: land, the basis and centre of the human existence, is in itself always subject to eternal metamorphosis and mutation, land, from ancient times bearing the imprints of generations, lands within the memories of human beings, that had to be forgotten because of political struggle, lands destroyed by nature or human negligence, wishful lands which have only emerged in our dreams, lands of promise and illusion.
