"The Question of Time " Jazz City Bilk meets Ballett am Rhein - 2nd performance

Neighbourly encounter: Jazz City Bilk meets Ballett am Rhein

Venue:
Balletthaus am Steinberg
Merowingerstraße 88, 40225 Düsseldorf

On 17 May, the Balletthaus on Merowingerstraße will become a meeting place for dance and jazz: Neshama Nashman, freelance choreographer and dancer with the Ballett am Rhein company, will present a world premiere that will enter into a dialogue with the jazz music that will also be performed live.

The four musicians of the evening are a reflection of the rich jazz scene in NRW: Mathias Haus and Peter Weiss represent the Düsseldorf scene, Genevieve O' Driscoll the Essen scene, Wolfgang Schmidtke the Wuppertal scene, all of whom know each other from other productions.

The right timing plays a decisive role in dance and music. Time and space determine our existence just as much as they characterise a choreography or a piece of music. When dance and music come into contact with each other live, they determine and influence each other, shaping space and time together.

In Neshama Nashman's creation "The Question of Time", two individuals meet in four short episodes. How they interact and perceive each other, whether they find each other or how their relationship with each other develops is a question of their environment and the right timing. In today's world of sensory overload and uncertainty, the free spirit of jazz music, improvisation and playing together is an attractive alternative to fear, restriction and control mania.

Especially in jazz music, the theme of time is particularly appealing due to improvisation. The musicians create a large part of the sound at the exact moment it is heard. The great American saxophonist Steve Lacy formulated this wittily and aptly:

"If you need to create 16 bars of classical music, you have all the time in the world- if you need to create 16 bars of jazz, you have 16 bars."

But jazz can also be composed, because tone formation, rhythm and harmony also retain their jazz character when they are predetermined, i.e. composed.

For "Die Frage der Zeit", Wolfgang Schmidtke, musician, composer and curator, has composed a four-movement suite and named it the "Bilk Suite" after its local destination. In this approx. 20-minute composition, the written part is quantitatively much larger than the improvised part. The performance in the context of dancers encouraged the use of different metres and tempi, even in the individual movements. The improvisational freedom also allows the artists dancing and making music to influence each other directly.

In a playful dialogue with each other, dance and music create a plea for more confidence and devotion. A liberation based on trust in impermanence and the power of constant change.

About the choreographer Neshama Nashman
Canadian Neshama Nashman studied at the Evelyn Hart Conservatory in Toronto, Canada, and honed her skills in courses at the Paris Opera, the Ellison Ballet and the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet. in 2019, she became a semi-soloist at the Krakow Opera Ballet in Poland. Here she danced "The Nutcracker" by Marius Petipa and Monika Strzepka's "Joan of Arc at the Stake" as well as the leading role of Helena in Giorgio Madia's world premiere of "A Midsummer Night's dream".

Neshama Nashman has been a company member of Ballett am Rhein since the 2020/21 season and has since danced the role of Grandmother in Demis Volpi's choreography "The Nutcracker", in which she also worked as a choreographer. She has also performed in "Carmen" by Roland Petit, "Baal" by Aszure Barton, "Salt Womb" by Sharon Eyal, "Phlegmatic Summer" by Michèle Anne De Mey, "Le sacre du printemps" by Marcos Morau, "Don't look at the jar" by Gil Harush and "The Four Temperaments" by George Balanchine.

Neshama Nashman also works as a choreographer and created "A Little Woman" based on Franz Kafka's short story of the same name for the Ballett am Rhein in the 2022/23 season and "And my beloved" to music by David Lang in the following season. As part of Noverre: Young Choreographers, she presented her creation "And so am I" in Stuttgart in 2024.