Review: “Alice in Wonderland” at Dresden State Operetta

What the State Operetta’s ballet director, Radek Stupka, has come up with, along with stage, lighting and video man, Guido Petzold and costume designer Thorsten Wietze, is a magnificent show that will also have its own run on the biggest stages in the world.

You can tell that there is a group of very enthusiastic dancers who are also in demand musically and dramatically in the daily state operetta life. Here, individual technical mastery is combined with nature in the game, set to music by Sven Helbig. The composer from Dresden is known as a cross between classical symphonic music and contemporary electronic music. A man who also worked on Rammstein shows and, in collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys, arranged the music for the ballets “The Most Incredible Thing” and “A Man From The Future.”

The Alice soundtrack, played live, begins with an intro in the style of simple film music. The stage is a huge cloud-shaped screen on which the title of the piece can be read and moves with the first bars of the music.

The audience experiences animation, video game editorial at its best. She flies through the clouds, so to speak, looks at a 3D map of London apparently from a bird’s eye view, zooms in and races on a winding course towards the house where little Alice lives with her parents. Suddenly her inner life becomes very real behind a gauze curtain. Here, again and again, the real and digital worlds miraculously merge. In that regard, great cinema from the start.

The State Operetta Company is inherently well-versed in all aspects of dance. This group is trained in classical and modern themes, but they can also dance hip-hop and dance like devils. It has artistic talents in its ranks, such as aerial acrobat Nina Kemptner, who adds height to the play in an amazing way, even with a vertical sheet.

There are three drummers who appear to be borrowed from Stomp. Good keyword, with Philip Lehmann and Felix Roßberg, they found two very interesting guests for this special movement style of the duo Zwiddeldum and Zwiddeldei in the break dance formation “The Saxonz”.

Melania Mazzaferro in the title role is an utterly likeable character who dances with girlish ease through a sometimes fast-paced, sometimes poetically choreographed arc of images, meeting all the technical challenges. But here it is not just about giving the crown.

Christian Vitiello also knows how to be erotically convincing as a blue caterpillar in the style of a Burmese temple dancer with a multi-foot ensemble. Vladislav Vlasov is a very evil Queen of Hearts in the true sense of the word and dances a merry dance with Ksenia Pogorelyak as the very young King of Hearts. The choreographic creativity of ballet director Radek Stupka seems inexhaustible.

The entire production is perfect in its precision. There’s not a millisecond of transition between what comes out of the hole under Johannes Bell’s stick and what happens on stage. Even Nina Kemptner’s meter-long panels of vertical drapery as the White Queen floats out of the picture are beautifully and precisely timed with the final chord of her scene. Here, a fantastic, well-rehearsed team proves what the Dresden State Operetta Ballet is capable of, with everyone working beside, behind and above the stage.