Ballet of the Graz Opera

The urban wolves howl at the moon in a chatty tone

(Bild: Werner Kmetitsch)

As the last premiere of this season, Graz Opera presents Yaron Shamir's dance piece "Urban Wolves" on the studio stage: visually powerful, but also irrelevant!

"Dance is the hidden language of the soul", as dance pioneer Martha Graham once put it, summing up the appeal of the art form: moving bodies can express something that cannot be put into words. However, Israeli choreographer Yaron Shamir did not entirely trust this credo in his piece "Urban Wolves", which premiered at the Theater in der Tonne Reutlingen in 2020 and can now be seen in an adapted version on the studio stage of Graz Opera. 

Danger and freedom
In it, he attempts to intersect the nocturnal moods of a city with the nocturnal moods of the soul: Danger and freedom, temptation and being driven, gloom and wildness - all of this finds its place in the city at night and turns all those who expose themselves to it into "urban wolves".

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Shamir expresses this mood impressively with his gloomy, foggy stage set full of black shreds and the images he draws on it with the ensemble of Ballett Graz, which also performs brilliantly in this piece. Sandrow M's music provides the necessary mix of anxiety and liberation in the best moments of the evening. In some moments, however, the soundscape sounds as if the werewolves from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video could appear at any moment.

Powerfully wild and stoically frozen
As impressive as the visual language of this evening is, Shamir's powerful, wild and then stoically frozen choreography does not always keep pace with it, is often not as compelling, as expressive as it could be. This is not least due to the fact that Shamir has decided to incorporate a narrator (Daniel Tille, who also wrote the text) into the piece. However, the narrator does not offer poetic additions to the dance, but instead mostly states the obvious, what one would actually like to see in the movement, the choreography.

As a result, the dance can only rarely express what is hidden in the soul. Despite this shortcoming, the wild and dark night piece is definitely worth seeing for dance enthusiasts.