Bremerhaven is worth a visit not only for the "Havenwelten" urban development project. Alfonso Palencia, since 2022 director of the small yet exquisite local city theater ballet with 14 dancers, aims to present contemporary dance to his audiences and allow his dancers to experience as diverse choreographic styles as possible. With the three-part evening Emotions of Dance, he achieves both.
It all begins with a loud heartbeat, to which the dancers twitch their bodies like giant hearts. Ihsan Rustem's Le Fil Rouge was created in 2016 for the American NW Dance Project and celebrates a — sometimes witty, sometimes dreamy — thoroughly youthful joy of life and love. The songs of six singers (from Yma Sumac to Edith Piaf to La Lupe) take the audience on a musical journey of emotions and form one of the common threads of the piece. Rustem has woven another into the sequences, with flashes of red peeking through the simple black and white costumes. The Pas de deux and group scenes can certainly be viewed with a wink: they are humorous, but never silly, and full of curiosity about life.
