Last night in Hamburg, choreographer Neumeier shed tears on stage

After Alina Koyokaru and Edwin Levazov presented their bouquets to John Neumeier, more than 30 leading actors on the stage piled their bouquets at Neumeier's feet, and countless streamers fell from the sky...

The dramatic scene took place inside the Hamburg State Opera on July 14. After five and a half hours of "long" performances, a "Nijinsky Gala" concluded the 49th edition of the Hamburg Ballet Festival. At the same time, Neumeier also spent his last night as artistic director and chief choreographer of the Hamburg Ballet. During the introduction of the last dance, "Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony," Neumeier choked up and burst into tears on the stage.

After the performance, the applause and cheers continued for nearly half an hour, and even the audience secretly wiped away tears. No one wanted to say goodbye to the master. It will be an unforgettable night for anyone in the audience, including me.

Hamburg, Germany's second-largest city and one of the world's most famous seaports, established its own opera house in 1678. Since then, the Hamburg State Opera has gone up and down, shut down due to mismanagement and blown up during World War II. Of course, the composer Gustav Mahler served as music director here for six years from 1891, a highlight moment engraved on the theater's exterior walls.

Now, the average tourist might not notice it as a historic theater when they pass by. But the Hamburg State Opera is a place to visit for art lovers, especially ballet fans. It was my first time in Hamburg, for the Hamburg Ballet Festival, for the Nijinsky Festival, and to pay tribute to the retiring Johann Neumeier.

In 1973, the Hamburg Ballet was established, and American choreographer Neumeier became its founding artistic director and chief choreographer. For half a century, Neumeier and the dance company have written a brilliant and profound page. Neumeier has been choreographing since 1960 and has created a total of 182 dance works, large and small, of which 123 were co-created with the Hamburg Ballet.

In 64 years, 182 dances, an average of nearly 3 works per year. Such exuberant creativity makes Neumeier a "god" in the eyes of everyone.

Xue Lin, a Chinese ballet dancer who is currently the principal of the Hamburg Ballet, joined Neumeier in 2011 and has been with the company for 13 years. Over the years, Xue Lin has participated in almost all of Neumeier's works, from group dances to lead dancers to starring roles. According to Xue Lin, Neumeier made "shadow puppetry" models in her early years of creation, but she did not go through that stage. "In recent years, he has chosen the music roughly first, given a few movements or prompts during rehearsal, and then let us improvise on our own."

The unique insight into music is one of Neumeier's most renowned characteristics.

"La Traviata" was written by Neumeier in 1978 for the Stuttgart Ballet and is now one of his masterpieces. It has been performed by the world's top dance companies, including the Paris Opera Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet, and the American Ballet Theatre. Neumeier's "La Traviata" did not use Verdi's opera music, but Chopin's piano music. Among them, the famous "White Pas de deux", he used the third movement of Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor, a delicate and melancholy piano music that resembles the fragility of Margaret, the purity of Armand, and their true love.

Not only that, Neumeier also has many symphonic ballet works, most of which are Mahler. In this year's Nijinsky Festival alone, three fragments of "Song of the Earth", "Young Magic Horn" and "Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony" were performed. In terms of arrangement, Neumeier presented the "Song of the Earth" fragment as the second act of the entire celebration, while the "Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony" fragment was the finale of the celebration.

"In the choreography, Neumeier has also been innovating, and he is always looking for new rhythms." Xue Lin said.

Whereas classical ballet is about opening, stretching, straightening and standing, Neumeier frees up the upper body and focuses on the body moving with the limbs. And this body rhythm is more for telling a story, expressing characters, or showing music. Earlier this year, the dance company revived Neumeier's 1995 work "The Odyssey." "He's really an imaginative person! You don't know how he came up with those dance moves, and I even think it has a Chinese folk dance feel to it."

In addition to music and dance, Neumeier's work is also essential for drama. At the Hamburg Ballet, there is a position called "Dramatic Construction", which was first established in 1975, and they assist Neumeier in deconstructing and reorganizing the story. Take "La Traviata" as an example, another classic image in French literature, Manon, takes the stage in the form of a play within a play, becoming a mirror image of Margaret's contradictions and unity, and also foreshadowing the end of Margaret's tragedy. Neumeier's "reference" to Manon has become a much-talked-about "masterstroke"

Unique musical taste, innovative dance vocabulary, and different theatrical expressions combine to build the "Neumeier's Ballet World".

John Neumeier is a "godman" in his writing. In his daily work, he is an "iron man".

"Neumeier actually said he was going to retire last year, but I never thought he would really leave," Ms. Lin said. "I really don't know how an 85-year-old can have so much energy."

Since 1975, the Hamburg Ballet has held the Hamburg Ballet Festival at the end of each season, usually lasting two weeks, culminating in a Nijinski celebration. This year's Hamburg Ballet Festival runs from June 30 to July 14. In addition to three new Neumeier "The End" and two guest performances by Birmingham Ballet, they also performed "Romeo and Juliet", "The Odyssey", "La Traviata", "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "The Glass Menagerie", often a different dance piece a day.

On July 11, for example, the dance troupe was going to perform "A Streetcar Named Desire," based on the novel of the same name by Tennessee Williams, but in the morning they were rehearsing "A Glass Menagerie," which was staged the next day. After the performance of "A Streetcar Named Desire," the dancers had to leave quickly and come to participate in "Give Me Peace" for Bach's Mass in B minor on the 13th.

"I only participated in five performances this year, so it's pretty easy," Xue Lin said with a smile. "Last year's 50th anniversary, the festival lasted for four weeks, and I participated in almost every performance, especially the three consecutive days of" The Nutcracker, "" Swan Lake, "and" Sleeping Beauty. "

In such a continuous schedule, Neumeier never stopped. He would attend every rehearsal, and he would sit in the rehearsal hall at nine o'clock every day. And at every performance, he also sat in the first row of the audience, almost never absent.

Neumeier is "Iron Man" not only because of his unusually strong physical qualities, but also because he sometimes seems less "human." Ms. Lin described her feelings for Neumeier as "very complex, love-hate," and laughed that "I love him as much as I hate him." In Neumeier's eyes, dance companies and works always come first. Neumeier set such a busy schedule for the Hamburg Ballet Festival, "and he felt that anything was possible."

Not only that, Neumeier rarely allowed dancers to go out as guests. First, because the schedule of the dance company itself was already very tight, and second, because he wanted the dancers to focus on their own works. Of course, Neumeier had to admit that his "iron fist policy" allowed him, the dancers and the Hamburg Ballet to achieve each other. In today's ballet world, no other dance company has so many new works, no other dancers can participate in the creation of so many dances, and no choreographer has the exuberant creativity of Neumeier.

Perhaps, every "god man" is essentially an "iron man".

Whether "God Man" or "Iron Man", John Neumeier is an 85-year-old man after all.

In a fragment of "Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony," which premiered in 1975, Mr. Neumeier trudges up to the stage and wanders through a group dance, observing the dancers as if looking back at his artistic career.

It was only at this moment that I suddenly noticed Neumeier's white hair and slightly hunched back. After all, before that, he would take the stage to give an introduction in front of every work. There was no hand card prompt, but his thinking was clear, and his expression was often pure and youthful.

From this moment onward, it was a "Neumer era" that followed the old man.

Mr. Neumeier left behind a rich "legacy" of 182 dance productions, the distinctive Hamburg Ballet, and Hamburg's ballet tradition, which also includes the Hamburg Ballet School, which opened in 1978, the Hamburg Ballet Center, which opened in 1989, and the National Youth Ballet, founded in 2011.

Today, 80 percent of Hamburg Ballet's dancers are graduates of the ballet school, where eight of the company's 13 current principals, including Ms. Lin, have studied. At this year's Nijinski celebration, the Hamburg Ballet School and the National Youth Ballet performed clips of "Wandering Away" and "In the Blue Garden," respectively, and their dance prowess should not be underestimated.

In addition, Neumeier established the John Neumeier Foundation in 2006 with the aim of preserving his dance and ballet-related collections and making them available to the public in the future, as well as preserving and disseminating his dance compositions and related materials.

After the departure of the "old man" Neumeier, the "new" Hamburg Ballet came into being.

For the first time on the book cover of the new season, a neat logo - Hamburg Ballett - has been juxtaposing Hamburg Ballett and John Neumeier in two lines for the past half-century, along with a blue and a gold ring symbolizing Neumeier's "idol", Vaslav Nijinsky. The link between Neumeier and the Hamburg Ballet was quickly cut in form.

But in terms of content, the new season of Hamburg Ballet will feature thirteen plays, of which Neumeier will own nine, including his classics "The Nutcracker," "Nijinsky," "Romeo and Juliet," and the dance company will also resume the premiere of "Soul Venice" in 2003. Neumeier and his work are about to become the "new tradition" of Hamburg Ballet.

Of course, the new artistic director Demis Volpi will also bring his first work for the Hamburg Ballet - a dance piece based on Hermann Hesse's novel "Demian". The new artistic director, born in 1985, defines his first season at the Hamburg Ballet as a "prologue", a process that connects the "Neumeier tradition" with the future.

Like the Shakespearean quote on the title page of the dance company's new season album: "All the past is a prologue."

In fact, the same is true for Neumeier. At the age of eighty-five, the future is still promising!