John Neumeier's Hamburg Ballett at Ravenna Festival: A Critique of Excess

At the Ravenna Festival, John Neumeier's Hamburg Ballett performed a program including Beethoven Fragments (from his 2018 Beethoven Project), Birthday Dances (1990) to Leonard Bernstein, and At Midnight (2013) to Gustav Mahler's Rückert Lieder sung by Benjamin Appl. Critic Stefano Tomassini argues that Neumeier's choreography, while technically brilliant, embodies an ideology of wasteful excess akin to a 'all you can eat' model, aligned with neoliberal consumption. The review highlights Neumeier's passion for biographies of irregular figures (Nijinsky, Beethoven, Christ, Gustav von Aschenbach, Anna Karenina, Eleonora Duse) and his fusion of academic vocabulary with modernist experimentation. Tomassini critiques the compulsive, suffocating density of movement, the decorative over substance, and the commodification of suffering bodies. He notes that despite intelligent spatial inventions and powerful solos, the choreography avoids true conflict or reflection, instead offering a postmodern saturation that ultimately mortifies female subjectivity. The Hamburg Ballett, directed by Neumeier since 1973, is described as one of Europe's finest contemporary ballet companies, but its cultural program risks unintelligibility if merely celebrated.