MORGEN; Choreography: Nacho Duato, Music: Pedro Alcalde - Teatro Real, Madrid 03-10-2022

Choreographer: Nacho Duato
Music: Pedro Alcalde

00:30 inicio: poema + tam tam
02:08 pasos a dos
05:36 cuchillo
08:27 muerte 1
09:51 sábana
16:29 soga
19:18 muerte 2
21:13 espejo
25:27 gas
28:50 muerte 3
30:45 interludio
32:21 Morgen: Richard Strauss Morgen op.27, nr. 4: for Clarinet, Violoncello and Marimba - orch. Pedro Alcalde

Set, Costumes: Nacho Duato
Lighting: Nicolás Fischtel (A.A.I.)
Clarinet: Joan Enric Lluna
Cello: Erica Wise
Percussion: Percussions de Barcelona: Robert Armengol, Miquel Vich, Núria Andorrà, Riccardo Massari Spiritini (Tarcordium)
Voice: Molly Malcolm
Musical recording and mastering: Ferran Conangla, Sergio Sotelo

Premiered by the Compañía Nacional de Danza (CND)
25-02-2022: Palacio de Festivales de Cantabria, Santander
03-10-2022: premiere at Teatro Real, Madrid, VIDEO
Performed in Spain, Germany, Colombia and Uruguay

Dancers 03-10-2022: Mar Aguiló, José Alberto Becerra, Felipe Domingos, Kayoko Everhart, Sara Fernandez, Erez Ilan, Shlomi Shlomo Miara (The Masked Man), Isaac Montllor, Shani Peretz, Anthony Pina, Alessandro Riga, Irene Ureña.

Morgen is a ballet on Dorothy Parker’s 1926 poem entitled Resumé. The poem consists of 8 short verses. The first 7 refer to the drawbacks of 7 different ways of committing suicide and the eighth and last suggests that another option could be to live. Morgen (“tomorrow” in German) is also the title of a song by Richard Strauss (op. 27, nr. 4) with which the ballet concludes, both for its intrinsic beauty, as for the content of hope from its text. The semicolon refers to the tattoo and subsequent project to help people who have survived a suicide attempt. projectsemicolon.com: “A semicolon is used when an author could’ve chosen to end their sentence but chose not to. The author is you, and the sentence is your life.”

During the composition process, the different sections dedicated to the first seven verses of the poem moved away, abstracting from the order established by the verses, in order to attend directly to the atmosphere, they epitomize. The minor second and descending chromatic fourth intervals, the emblematic elements of the baroque “doctrine of the affections” to represent lament, mourning and death, appear in each of the different sections. The use of different forms of ostinati has the function of producing a sensation of processional movement, in the manner of a peculiar musical exequies.

Pedro Alcalde