UNSER CRANKO

John Cranko would have been 100 years old in 2027. To mark the start of this anniversary, the Stuttgart Ballet is bringing some of these rarely danced pieces back to the stage - out of deep love for our choreographer, who founded and fundamentally shaped the company. Initials R.B.M.E. was Cranko's tribute to his dancers and is also his legacy. The four movements of Johannes Brahms' Piano Concerto are dedicated to the personalities of the original cast: Richard Cragun, Birgit Keil, Marcia Haydée and Egon Madsen. Cranko portrays them as strong individuals supported by mutual friendship. John Cranko's homage to Galina Ulanova, the first Russian Juliet, was legendary . The seven-minute pas de deux was originally danced by Marcia Haydée and Richard Cragun and made Cranko's fascination with the pioneering partner dance of the Russian school visible. Inspired by Anton von Webern's dramatic Passacaglia, Opus 1 picks up on the moods of the music. The ballet poetically depicts the loneliness and helplessness of man in the eternal cycle of life and death. Poème de l'extase tells of love, fulfillment and transience: an ageing diva rejects an admirer because she has already lived her life to the full. The gold, colors and textures evoke the Art Nouveau style of the Belle Époque at the end of the 19th century - a time as bygone as the former lovers who animate the woman's memory in Cranko's ballet.