Cullberg Ballet at the Edinburgh Festival 2003

Stuart Sweeney · **Posted:** Sun Aug 10, 2003 8:09 am

Two interviews with Johan Inger, the new AD of Cullberg Ballet:

Ambiguous footing
Festval Dance: Choreographer Johan Inger’s first test since moving to Cullberg Ballet will be four nights at the Edinburgh Festival. Ellie Carr meets him for The Sunday Herald.

When Johan Inger finally left the cosiness of Holland’s world-famous Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT) for Sweden’s Cullberg Ballet he must have felt a bit like a teenager fleeing the family nest.

Over the 13 years he spent with NDT, Inger had built a reputation for being a quirky choreographer and a charismatic performer. This month he takes up his post as artistic director of Cullberg, Sweden’s best-established and most original modern dance company.

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Dancer with an eye on the future aims to prove that past successes are no Fluke
By Jackie McGlone for Scotland on Sunday

JOHAN Inger is a man with one foot in the past while the other is pointed purposefully at the future. It’s a neat balancing act and if anyone can maintain his equilibrium thus poised, it’s the former Nederlands Dans Theater soloist and choreographer.

The 36-year-old has just arrived at his new home in Stockholm at the end of yet another whirlwind day of activity. "He’s so very, very busy," sighs his Spanish wife Carolena, a former dancer with the Theater, while the newly-appointed director of the Cullberg Ballet apologises profusely for being late for our interview, which we conduct to lively noises from the couple’s baby daughter Alva.

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Emma Pegler · **Posted:** Tue Aug 12, 2003 11:40 pm

Edinburgh reports: the night of the stick people

Ismene Brown of The Telegraph reviews the Cullberg Ballet at the Playhouse

Quote:

The Cullberg Ballet of Sweden has made its international name less with its founder, Birgit Cullberg, than with the singular talent of her son, Mats Ek. Very few choreographers have an unmistakable fingerprint, but Ek has it - a physical style of angular, knotted stick-people, living a dense emotional life filtered through psychological thickets of Freud and Dada.

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Alice Bain
The Guardian

Quote:

Since visiting the International festival in 1999 with a season of Mats Ek's choreography centred on his disturbing Giselle, the Cullberg Ballet comes with "not to miss" stamped all over it. This time, in a double bill, a glimpse of the future is offered alongside past success, as the incoming artistic director, Johan Inger, joins forces with Ek, director until 1993 and son of founder Birgit Cullberg.
There is much the two men share. Both works are dramatically lit, starkly staged and theatrically performed; they concentrate on the psychology of the characters. There is a crossover of movement style: the staccato gesture, the unexpected angle, the neat little groupings that trot dancers round in a flock. There are differences, too. The heart of Inger's choreography beats with a lyrical sweep; Ek takes a tougher stance, keeping his dancers elastic but shaping them with a disjointed beauty.

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Stuart Sweeney · **Posted:** Sat Aug 16, 2003 4:59 am

There's a review of Cullberg by Clement Crisp in the FT. It will come as no surprise to anyone that it is extremely scathing. In his wilful disregard to attempt to understand what the artists are trying to convey and then comment on their success or otherwise, he is putting himself before the art form in my view.

I feel no desire to link to his diatribe, but if you are really keen to read it go the FT and search on "ballet".

<small>[ 16 August 2003, 07:19 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Stuart Sweeney · **Posted:** Sun Aug 17, 2003 3:34 am

Home on the deranged
Jann Parry reviews Cullberg for The Observer

Men in hats, black or white, are up to no good in Swedish dance productions. Hats mean uptight authority or Magrittean madness: both featured in Cullberg Ballet's double bill by Mats Ek and Johan Inger, past and present directors of the 36-year-old company.

Inger took over this month, having started his choreographic career with Nederlands Dans Theater. He combines the near- balletic quality of NDT with the peasant earthiness of Ek's work. If his Edinburgh opener, Home and Home, is anything to go by, Inger's quirkiness is becoming darker as he grows older. I doubt, though, he'll ever be as off-the-wall weird as Ek.

Home and Home was inspired partly by a murder case in which an immigrant father killed his daughter for having an affair with a Swede. Home is not a safe place.

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Shocks, frocks and two smoking ballets
Ellie Carr reviews Cullberg Ballet

With no storyline, and themes that float in and out of view like apparitions, this double bill from Sweden’s Cullberg Ballet still manages to nail down human emotion, laying bare everything from abject sorrow to fear to fit-to-burst joy on a stage that seems a window on the soul.

The dancing is pretty good too. With ex-Nederlands Dans Theater dancer/choreographer Johan Inger freshly installed as director, the slightly misnamed Cullberg Ballet (it is resolutely modern – not a flash of pink ballet tights in sight) has much to prove after many heady years with Mats Ek as boss, then star choreographer.

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Stuart Sweeney · **Posted:** Sat Aug 23, 2003 4:05 am

Review from The Independent.

Quote:

This festival programme by the Cullberg Ballet marks a changeover in the Swedish company's history: one work by its former director and long-time choreographer Mats Ek, and one by Johan Inger, the incoming director who, although Swedish, has spent most of his career until now with Nederlans Dans Theater.

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Cullberg Ballet at the Edinburgh Festival 2003

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