Roland Fister: Alice in Wonderland

World premiere ballet: 18.3.2017 at Landestheater Coburg
World premiere children’s concert: 25.10.2018 at Landestheater Coburg

White rabbits can’t dance? Nonsense. Sure they can. And the frogs join in voluntarily. Welcome to Wonderland.
In this piece, the children’s book classic by Lewis Carroll gets moving. Everything begins like it should in a proper british children’s book: Alice is watching various characters and their particularities. Little later while listening to a story being read to her, those characters show up again. Although now they are no hectic business men, grumpy aunts or ill-mannered children but rather a white rabbit,  the queen or a mad hatter. That is supposed to be strange? Not at all. The fantastic world of a child’s imagination just doesn’t match well with adult logic.

Basing on this paradox, the mathematician Lewis Carroll has created one of the most beautiful children’s books of our time. And like it always is the case with great children’s books: Grown-ups love them just as much. Roland Fister’s music is a perfect fit to Carroll’s crazy journey through the fantastic world of imagintation. He knows how to use the grand orchestral effects but also the intimate cantilena,the music directly grows to the hearts of dancers and audience. And of course you can sense a little british “spleeniness” in it, just as it is supposed to be. Nonsense never has been this educational and rarely as optically and audibly pleasing.