“Chaplin!”: Ballet Director Pays Homage to Charlie Chaplin with Dance Ensemble in Würzburg

A hat, a cane and a much too large jacket, later supplemented by a pair of old slippers and a mustache. In addition, a little guy with his feet turned outwards. The silhouette is enough to know who it is about.

Ten dancers and dancers in »Charlie Chaplin« outfit dance stumbling and stumble across the stage while dancing in the »prologue« in fast slapstick style. The sticks are dance partners and a unifying accessory. With sounds from »City Lights«, the Philharmonic Orchestra plays a composition by Chaplin himself. Hats fly across a screen from the black and white past through the blue sky to the present.

It’s not one Charlie Chaplin, which the audience will encounter this evening in the Theaterfabrik Blaue Halle. There are many interpretations of a man whose unmistakability you think you know as a comedian, but whose complexity is hard to grasp. “I am what I am: a unique and different man,” Charlie Chaplin (1889 – 1977) is said to have said himself.

Now Dominique Dumais, ballet director at Mainfrankentheater Würzburg, with her twelve-piece dance ensemble with »Chaplin!« in front of the silent film icon. His charismatic sense of humor made him a legend. He parodied politics, in his legendary peace speech he appealed to charity and the strength of the community. He was constantly composing, choreographing and perfecting his body language. He was a filmmaker Actor, composer, musician, acrobat and dancer. At the same time, more critical biographers paint a different picture of the man from London who grew up in the most difficult of circumstances.

Chaplin himself is said to have left nothing to chance, he practiced and perfected his calculated mishaps down to the smallest detail. The dance ensemble must have put a similar amount of work into learning Chaplin’s typical body language. Above all, Dumais trained with the dancers and dancers also slipping, stumbling and falling to minimize the risk of injury at the sometimes rapid pace on stage. The individual scenes tell moments that shaped Chaplin’s biography. As in a silent film, the chapter title flickers on the walls to the left and right of the stage at the beginning.

»Humble Beginnings«

Let’s start with “Humble Beginnings”. Chaplin grew up in poor circumstances at the single parents, mother struggling with mental health issues. He spent time in an orphanage, performed at the music hall as a child, left school at 13 and supported himself with odd jobs. Cries of children and barking dogs ring out in the Blue Hall, young Charles dances through a gloomy atmosphere, repeatedly hiding his face, seems torn and driven by dark shadows.

A hat, a cane, a jacket: The role of »Tramp« gave Chaplin his breakthrough. With high speed and full of energy, he now whirls towards the start of his career and fights for his place, freshly dressed and fencing with his stick. Verena Hemmerlein, who designed the stage and costume design, repeatedly places people from real life in colorful contemporary clothing alongside the character in the film in the Tramp costume.

Perhaps the most magical scene of the evening – »Of Searching and Finding« – revolves around a white balloon. To Beethoven’s piano concert No. 3 (solo piano Silvia Vassallo Paleologo) dancers transform it into a moon and dance partner against a deep blue background.

The piano concert, Chaplin is reported to have said, was for him “an approximation of truth that no greater work of art could be.” It is a source of encouragement for him.

Compositions by Chaplin

Anyway: the selection of music with compositions by Chaplin himself as well as works through the ages from Henry Purcell to Peter Tchaikovsky to Nino Rota makes the evening extremely entertaining, General Music Director Enrico Calesso guides his Philharmonic Orchestra Würzburg with his usual sovereignty and commitment through sound worlds. The fact that he actually followed the request »Maestro, please sing!« with a hat and a broad grin and intoned Chaplin’s »Nonsense Song« from »Modern Times« was a lot of fun for the audience.

In the second act after the break, the stage – before it was a small one on the big stage, a structure that made exciting lifting figures and extraordinary crawling performances possible – has been transformed into a studio. Chaplins waddle and flit through the auditorium. On the stage in the “limelight” a whole crowd of Chaplin tumbles out of one of the three doors. His great classics »Lights of the Big City« and »Modern Times« are included. Many moments are funny, similarly many are thoughtful.

Different place, different time: It’s stormy, glitter blows across the stage like in a storm, the dancers fight against gusts and headwind in slow-motion movements. On October 15, 1940, Chaplin’s first sound film »The Great Dictator« premiered as a satirical parody of fascism. Chaplin’s voice can now be heard on tape in the Theaterfabrik as an appeal to peace, democracy and humanity. With expressive, grand, uncompromising gestures, the ensemble accompanies the speech that is as relevant today as it was more than 80 years ago.

The enchanting mixture of comedy and depth, lightness and melancholy, humor and deep humanity characterized Chaplin’s works – they also stand for Dumai’s choreography.

Immensely multifaceted

The scenes are extremely multifaceted. The dance ensemble studied the body language of the movement artist and dancer Chaplin and developed it into contemporary dance art. And yet at the end individual dance scenes are surprisingly classic. Whirling turns, highly dynamic jumps, lifting figures, stretched bodies: all of this is very, very nice to look at.

In the end you feel quite close to the person and the artist Charlie Chaplin. The audience not only paid tribute to the Würzburg dance division and the orchestra with standing ovations, but also to Charlie Chaplin posthumously for his life’s work.

MICHAELA SCHNEIDER

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