Death and the Maiden

German expressionism & perpetual motion

The world is dominated by two opposing forces in turn: Good and Evil, Yin and Yang, Life and Death. Every world is governed and shaped by the duality of two forces that are both contrary and complementary and that interact to create balance and harmony. Opposites are interrelated, and therefore inseparable. You have to die to be born again.

In creating Death and the Maiden, Thoss drew inspiration from these principles and the four elements: the water that slakes our thirst, the air that we breathe, the fire that warms us and the earth that feeds us. When we speak about these four elements, we’re speaking about the same energy seen from four different perspectives: it is Earth when it is in its mineral form; Water, when it melts; Air, when it rises; and Fire, when it is excited. Over the course of time, the four elements are born, live, reproduce and die—and, like the Maiden herself, transform.

Just as a playwright collects a handful of characters from different worlds and brings them together in a space created from scratch to produce a new work, I created my Death and the Maiden and peopled its world. The choreography for death and my maiden is an image of life, complete with its symbols: earth, air, water and fire. For every one of us, identifying with these four elements calls on a personal body language that evokes the various periods of life. We endeavour tirelessly to believe in our dreams, to trust in our hopes and give a meaning to our lives.

In hope, in love, isn’t there a sense of security from which we can successfully wage our battles and attain, to the best of our ability, some form of achievement in our lives? Whatever it may be, its name—death—does not tell us a great deal about it. It is one of the most fundamental experiences of human existence; everything leads to it. It is the one event that will occur with absolute certainty.

Nevertheless, our understanding can scarcely grasp it, as if we were fated to be eternal spectators. Centuries and centuries of cultural history and thousands of questions posed by philosophers and writers have not flushed it out of its dark hideout, as if all those questions never aimed for its essence but merely skimmed its surface, allowing it to remain standing behind us in its dark, heavy cloak.

Implicit in the need to know death and to confront it is the need to confront life. Life and death can be considered as a whole. Just as the summer needs the cold of the winter and the day needs the calm of the night, and just as we must breathe in and out to survive, so life needs death. Without death there can be no new life; it is the natural cycle of growth and decline. It is nature’s balance, in which we are all participants and which offers us small tastes of death every day. And yet how often do we try to take several deep breaths in a row, as if life in its purest form could do without the benefits of breathing out?

As simple as it may seem, life offers us a chance to live without fear only if we see death as an integral part of life, and not as something remote, a dark, gloomy stain at the end of life. Whether we fear it or not is of little importance to death. My new ballet, for its part, says “yes” to both. But for now, the time has come not to die but to live passionately, to love and dance, sometimes with death and sometimes without it.

-Stephan Thoss

In creating Death and the Maiden, Stephan Thoss chose to look at death in a new light. “Normally, death is bad, the black shadow in the background. We are safe when death is really far from us. When he comes closer, we start to shake. But my idea was to see death as part of life.” Inspired by the Eastern concept of yin and yang, Thoss explored the idea of there being a duality, like black and white, in all aspects of life. “Breathing in gives life, breathing out is like dying. In the day we wake up; in the night we sleep. Sleep is a rehearsal for dying. The seasons are the same: autumn and winter for sleep, springtime and summer for waking up. We need the balance between these two things. When we understand that death is part of life, then we are not so full of fear.”

Sometimes, says Thoss, we are safe with death, safer than without him. “When it’s time for me to go, death will be there to take me. If I know sleep and night and winter, I know death.”

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“I really finished the piece a long time ago,” says Thoss. He explains that in Dresden, where he makes his home, he spent hours and hours listening to the music, sketching little stick figures on sheets of paper—his personal notation system—and mapping out the ballet’s structure. He decided precisely where to place the tables, doors and windows; how many dancers would be onstage at a particular time; and exactly how they would move. When he arrived in Montreal, he was well prepared. Then he stepped into the studio to work with the dancers and began making changes—many changes—to his ballet. A month before the premiere, he still had half the ballet to rework, which meant that he had to choreograph three minutes per day. “It’s a little bit stressful,” he admits, with a rueful smile.

It’s good to be very prepared, says Thoss, yet not have things fixed in stone: to be relaxed and flexible. Because he makes changes in the studio during rehearsals, the dancers feel involved, that they are contributing to the choreography.

One day, Thoss glimpsed a dancer at the back of the studio, improvising and capturing precisely the feeling conveyed by the music. When Thoss incorporated the dancer’s movements into the ballet, the dancer realized that she had inspired him and was pleased. Says Thoss, “This process is very nice. In the end, you have a piece that is created for this company and with this company.”

Shelley Pomerance — Journalist, lecturer and host of the pre-show talks