A threatening celebration that seems never to end

By Anne de Paço (excerpt)

“Of the glory and absurdity of life”

For his Vienna premiere, Louis Stiens chose not to work with existing compositions as with recent work for the Leipzig Ballet, Ballet Graz, and the Zürich Ballet. Instead, he chose to enter into a dialogue with a composer. His thinking is strongly influenced by the image and conceptual approaches, and he is drawn to collaboration with composers – their work, often abstract and created in secluded isolation, contrasts with that of a choreographer who deals with people and their interaction in physical space.

Stiens brought on Lisa Streich as his musical partner, who composed a commissioned score for the Vienna State Ballet. Her work is self-referential, drawing on that which has come before, but rearranged, welded together, superimposed, and cast within a different light via a new instrumentation for the Volksoper Wien’s orchestra. Pieces of different compositions, including Himmel (2021), Ballhaus, and Ofelia (2022) are assembled into a single piece. “It is a new piece,” says Streich, “that creates its own means of connecting the existing music, and gains a different sense of expression to the original work.”



The result is neither ballet music in the traditional sense, nor a soundscape. Instead, it is a composition that becomes an almost disruptive force of its own in space. Rather than following a conventional dramatic arc, she creates states of tension that unfold through circular structures, which themselves evolve through fragile and often violent disruptions – spectral textures, oscillating beats, and irregular chord patterns.

From these, fragments of seemingly familiar music arise like islands in a vast archipelago, push up against one another, begin to stagger, or immediately fall apart – a Ukrainian lullaby, a Schubertian sigh of longing that could only be composed in Vienna, waltz sounds that echo a bygone era, and clownish polka rhythms.



Streich pushes “audacious, flat dance music” and distorted military marches to the limit of overload and to the point where control is lost. It is “an expression of the glory and absurdity of life,” she says. “I’m concerned with merging the present with the past and future, with a certain reflection and a certain tragedy – but also with looking ahead.” Here, the familiar suddenly seems strange, beauty is more real in the memory, and a deep and great seriousness is stricken through with ironic gestures. It is music that robs itself of stability by opening up areas of reference, and in doing so achieves its own particular humour. At the same time, however, it speaks to a permanent danger in a deeply unsettling way.

For Louis Stiens, Streich’s “Music for Dance Theatre” High opens an acoustic musical terrain that not only supports the dance, but offers resistance, friction through surprising textural changes, and challenge through structural ambivalence. It becomes a musical metaphor, sometimes closely coupled to the movement of, and sometimes coexistent with, what the dancers experience and traverse onstage. “A threatening celebration that seems never to end,” according to the choreographer, “in that area of conflict between ‘high’ and ‘low,’ the godly and the everyday.”

From: "Ein bedrohliches Fest, das nicht enden will" (A threatening celebration that seems never to end). Original contribution to the program of the world premiere of Lisa Streich's HIGH on June 14, 2025, by Anne de Paço, Chief Dramaturg of the Vienna State Ballet. Published with kind permission by the author. 


Find out more about the world premiere in our blog article.