Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on April 2010

Photo by Hidemi Seto

For all their strengths, Japan’s best ballet companies are also beset by weaknesses. The Tokyo Ballet features international star Mizuka Ueno, but lacks a strong corps de ballet. K-Ballet has Tetsuya Kumakawa, but he’s injury-plagued and aging. The New National Theatre Ballet enjoys an excellent corps de ballet, but some feel that it has come to rely on programs lacking in risk.

The company has addressed this weakness by hiring Birmingham Royal Ballet artistic director David Bintley, a former collaborator who will do double duty at the NNTB from the 2010/2011 season. But before that new era begins, the company reprises the work with which it and Bintley made a splash in 2005.

Carmina Burana is the name given to a medieval manuscript of love songs and poems unearthed at a German monastery in 1803. Believed to have been written by student monks, the songs contain passages that parody the church and depict priests engaging in gambling and drinking and giving in to sexual temptation.

Between 1935 and 1936, German composer Carl Orff set some of the poems to medieval-flavored music, which provides the basis for Bintley’s choreography. After debuting Carmina Burana in 1995 with the Birmingham Royal Ballet, Bintley earned rave reviews for a program that featured his dancers as neo-Nazi thugs and temptresses clad in virtually nothing.

Victoria Marr of the Birmingham Royal Ballet will be appearing as the goddess Fortuna, along with the NNTB’s Yukawa Mamiko and Ayako Ono. Robert Parker, also from Birmingham, stars as the hapless seminarian, and is joined by Nozomu Haga and Ryuji Yamamoto.

“It was something very different and new, not only for the audiences in Tokyo but also for the dancers,” Bintley recalled in a recent interview about the NNTB’s 2005 staging of Carmina Burana. “The dancers are very used to dancing to the classic ballets, and Carmina is a much more modern and 21st-century dance expression. It has very modern and rock’n’roll lighting and costumes, and I think it was very unusual for them.”

The NNTB’s selection of Bintley looks like a win-win situation. For its part, the company gets a director with considerable popular charm, which should work to its advantage with a Japanese public that has taken to the mass-appeal creations of the likes of Matthew Bourne. Bintley, meanwhile, has the opportunity to cement his legacy with one of the world’s key ballet-going publics.

Also to be performed is Bintley’s own Galanteries, set to some of Mozart’s earliest works. The compact production and understated music of this piece should act to cleanse the palate after appetites have been sated by the gargantuan Carmina. Bintley notes that Galanteries is already more than two decades old, but enthuses that the Tokyo production will feature all-new costumes from emerging Canadian designer Kandis Cook.

Carmina Burana Newly appointed Artistic Director David Bintley directs the New National Theatre Ballet. May 1-5, various times, ¥4,200-¥10,500. New National Theatre, Shibuya. Tel: 0570-9990.