Lørdans - Back to the future at Den Norske Opera & Ballett

With Back to the Future you experience two powerful short ballet pieces from choreographer William Forsythe, and a newly written work from our in-house choreographer Alan Lucien Øyen.

William Forsythe is the choreographer who demonstrates the unending possibilities contained in ballet. Sound, lighting, darkness, movement and the sets often constitute a pure and raw oneness in his work.

In One Flat Thing, reproduced 20 tables together with the bodies and movements of the dancers body form an ingenious and pulsating system, against a background of electronic music. Dancers pass under, over and around the tables, which are pulled, hammered and jumped on. The expression is full of energy, dynamic – and fascinating.

Steptext is one of Forsythe’s signature pieces, danced to Bach’s baroque music. When the Norwegian National Ballet danced this ballet in 2013, Dagbladet’s reviewer named it the favourite Forsythe piece, and wrote: “Three men and a woman here sweat their way through an athletic ballet with elastic and tension-filled relationships, which also has room for some hilarity.”

William Forsythe is known as “the choreographer’s choreographer”, and has inspired Alan Lucien Øyen, who gives us the evening’s final piece, newly written for the occasion. Time, expectations and a journey through time are the keywords in Back to the Future, in which the stage is placed within a framework of high wooden walls and light. In-house choreographer and winner of the Hedda Prize, Alan Lucien Øyen, whose most recent work for the Norwegian National Ballet was Petrusjka, presents delicious, playful and pure choreography. And it’s possible that the date of the premiere is not a coincidence – the date to which Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) travels in the film Back to the Future.