If ballet is the art of finely crafted stage gestures, John Neumeier pushes those human gestures to their limit.
The celebrated German choreographer, here for Cape Town City Ballet's 80th birthday, breaks all the rules.
He gets dancers to stamp, push, curl, wave and even slap one another. It makes for sit-up-and-be-mesmerised dance theatre - far removed from dying swans and sugarplum fairies.
His dancers, physically charged and challenged, are required to inhabit and move in ways beyond their immediate space. They fill the stage with sweeping dynamics, propelled by the live music from the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra.
Vaslav (dedicated to Nijinsky to glorious piano music by JS Bach ) and Le Sacre (to the blistering 1913 Stravinsky score) date from the heady days of the mould-breaking 1970s. The enraptured silence of the first night audience confirmed the lingering power of those ballets.
In Vaslav, visiting Hamburg dancer Alexander Riabko was the star, and Cape Town City Ballet's Sarah-Lee Chapman gave an astounding Ophelia-like performance in the dizzy climax of Le Sacre.
The relatively new Spring and Fall (to Dvorak's string serenade, opus 22) is playful with moves combining graceful gestures, typical leaps and lifts, with burly physicality and kaleidoscopic stage formations.
There is much to celebrate about this special collaboration, not the least the local ballet company's historical association with modern trends. In the past it sustained superb performers, mirrored last week, on the Artscape stage by a skilled younger generation.
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