Without Words. Prelude. White Darkness

Without Words is a plotless one-act ballet filled with metaphors and allusions. Taking the form of antique statues, the dancers tell a story that can be interpreted as a memory of love and other ordeals which people undergo through their lives. The story is free from details of the routine — it emerges from and goes back into the existential darkness, endless like an eternal sleep. Nacho Duato sees dance as a never-ending melody. He creates exquisite multi-figure compositions, natural movements, steps and lifts. Like fire or water, it feels like you could watch it forever, going with the flow of your thoughts.

The choreography of one-act ballet Prelude brings together and celebrates three styles of dance: romantic, classical, and modern. For this very reason, critics have called the production a ‘choreographic map of the world of dance’. This performance, rooted in academic theatre and staying true to traditional customs of staging and stage effects, can sometimes forget in which era it belongs: sylphs rejoice on the ballroom floor while mysterious dancers in black are zealots of academic ballet tradition. Sequences of more reserved choreography are abruptly imposed upon by a set that seeks to transform its allotted immobility into movement or at least a semblance of it. The ballet is not based upon one central storyline, but rather upon the polyphony of playfulness and rivalry between sculptural forms.

Nacho Duato composed the one-act ballet, White Darkness, as a requiem for the untimely loss of a sister. The result is a masterpiece which, according to critics, has “reached impossible heights” in the landscape of modern art.
The ballet’s heroine, having lost faith in love, seeks oblivion; but the path she has chosen brings her not joy but feverish agitation, followed by disappointment, alienation and self-imposed isolation.
Nacho Duato does not consider dance to be a form of social commentary, but he nevertheless uses it to convey the most complex of themes. “I am deeply struck by how sad it is when young people allow drugs to ruin their lives and slip into a dark world, a world so dark, in fact, that there is no escape from it,” the choreographer explains, on the subject of the emotional background to this production.