Fourth song in, and the ticktack drum beat, yelps and grunts that open
Sympathy for the Devil paralyse the packed theatre. Forty years on, the
opening line, “Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and
taste”, still chills the bones.
Except that there is no Mick Jagger on the stage in Aarhus. This is
Satisfaction, 25 Rolling Stones songs old and new, classics, forgotten gems
and the odd questionable choice, reinterpreted and danced by Peter Schaufuss
Ballet.
The spotlight picks out a muscled figure, naked save for a loincloth, hunched
in a wheelchair. A man in a dark business suit pushes him. As the guitars
crash and Lucifer’s tale unfolds, lights spiral above the stage. Girls
wearing armoured breasts and angel wings dance around until the devil – who,
after all, can come in many guises – rises from his chair and writhes a
sinuous, seductive path behind the curtain. Even in dance, the song’s menace
remains.
Disturbing stuff, but there is no pause for breath. As songs and tempo change,
so does the atmosphere. As Tears Go By is a languid male solo; Ruby Tuesday
features a romancing Japanese couple; Time Is on My Side builds a sensual
mood. This turns plain dirty when a couple’s amorousness during You Can’t
Always Get What You Want adds raunch that Jagger would relish. Their
conjunction is interrupted by the return of both Lucifer and the white
angels, who make a third and final appearance in Sweet Black Angel. Aside
from the winged-ones motif, there is no narrative running through
Satisfaction, just individual vignettes and interpretations of Stones songs.
Satisfaction opens for a limited season at the Apollo, in the West End, on
August 28, a week after the Stones finish their stint at the O2arena. Peter
Schaufuss insists this is mere coincidence, though he is hoping that the
band might find time to see the show. And show is what it is, for while the
dancers are all classically trained, the concept – loud music, rock’n’roll
lighting, coruscating colours, skimpy costumes and, as a climax, an audience
sing-along to, yep, you guessed it, (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction – might
give Royal Ballet purists the vapours.
“Satisfaction is a dancical,” Schaufuss says firmly. “I really don’t care what
anyone else thinks about it. Do not confuse this with ballet. This is
another – I wouldn’t say art form, but a different way of doing shows. Just
because it is popular doesn’t mean you can’t do good-quality work. I want
people to dance out of the theatre as if they had drunk half a bottle of
champagne, leaving on a high.”
While Schaufuss literally grew up backstage (both his parents were dancers) at
the Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen, he was always drawn to rock’n’roll.
He saw the Roll-ingStones play the Tivoli Gardens in 1965. “I was 14. Some
kidsin my neighbourhood said, ‘We have to see this new group.’ I didn’t know
what I was seeing, but they were so raw and exciting. Afterwards, I walked
past their hotel, thinking they must have an awful lot of fun up there. I
knew that the show did not finish on the stage.”
In his late teens, Schaufuss started experimenting by choreographing ballet
pieces to rock music for Danish tele-vision. Then, when he was 19, the
London Festival Ballet (now English National Ballet) invited him to become a
principal dancer. For the next 25 years, he danced the great classical
roles, as well as becoming artistic director of ENB (1984-90), the Berlin
Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet. In 1997, he founded his own company,
based in Holstebro, West Jutland. “During my career as a dancer, I produced
the classics, but I could never get back to where I had started out, because
they wanted a new production of Swan Lake or Nutcracker,” he says in perfect
if sometimes quirky English.
“I always wanted to do something with our generation’s music, but it has taken
these years to mature into a proper art form like jazz and classical music.
The Stones are a good example of that, having written music for more than 40
years and established a body of work like Tchaikovsky. It hasn’t just been a
flash in the pan, like the Spice Girls.”
Matthew Bourne has shown how it is possible to turn classical ballet on its
head and attract a new audience. Schaufuss has taken a different route,
setting iconic popular music to dance and choosing controversial subjects.
Both turn the media spotlight onto his small company. “Success for an artist
is a full house and an audience enjoying themselves,” he insists. “At the
same time, I don’t think there should be limits to what you can challenge
the audience with.”
Schaufuss has used rock music as an in-joke – he reimagined the work of
Denmark’s preeminent 19th-century classical choreographer, August
Bournonville, to David Bowie’s Let’s Dance. He has also created a Beatles
show and The King, a piece about Elvis Presley that reaches a climax with
Wagner, because “Wagner is about gods and Elvis is almost a god”. He wanted
to bring The King to London, and so he flew to Los Angeles to meet Presley’s
people. Once there, however, he was told by a man festooned with gold chains
and surrounded by pictures of himself sitting on Elvis’s lap that it could
not happen because the show was not their idea.
“Fortunately, we didn’t have any problems getting the rights with the Rolling
Stones, as they own all their songs,” Schaufuss says. “Elvis doesn’t, and
nor does Paul Mc-Cartney.” He is also fortunate that licensing Scandinavian
performing rights is relatively cheap, so he can put on shows that might be
prohibitively expensive in London.
He has produced 17 new shows in the past 10 years and loves a good wind-up, as
he has shown with his royal trilogy. One of nature’s flirts, he knew Diana,
Princess of Wales well. When she was patron of ENB, she used to sneak into
the rehearsal rooms to dance, and they would lunch together at Kensington
Palace. “I wanted to do a piece in her memory and, today, you cannot leave
things too long,” he says. “Because I didn’t live in the UK, I was a bit
more detached from the emotions of the time.” When Diana – The Princess
premiered in Denmark, it caught flak from British tabloids. A limited run in
Manchester in 2005 did not win over critics, though scenes featuring Camilla
as a jodhpur-clad dominatrix, flogging a cold-hearted prince with her riding
crop, raised plenty of laughs.
Unabashed, his company has since produced Charles – The Prince, complete with
dancing tampons. And, this autumn, he is threatening to open his
state-of-the-art theatre with William – The King. For all three, he has used
songs by the Cure. “I wanted to take something unique and British from that
period,” he says. “It challenged me, because some of their music is hard to
put on stage.” In fact, he is currently grappling with an extremely long
Cure track in William. The scores also include music from Elgar and Danish
rock. If William – The King is not ready to reign over his new theatre, he
might open with Michael – I’m Bad, a dance biography of Michael Jackson.
This is still being assembled, and Schaufuss refuses to reveal whether it
will touch on the allegations of child abuse that brought Jackson low.
The genesis of Satisfaction was simpler. Just after Christmas 2005, feeling “a
little heavy behind the ears and in the middle, I went into this very rough
room we had, played Stones music, sat there in the dark and made up my mind
that it was what I wanted to do. The location reflected my early experience
in the Tivoli Gardens, where they were very rough. And I wanted to do a
different piece. We had done it within 10 weeks, which is the beauty of
having your own company. We don’t start the day after tomorrow, but now”.
After narrowing down 450 songs to 60, then 25, Schaufuss set about creating a
rock show, using a £500,000 state-of-the-art Martin lighting rig
(conveniently, Martin is one of the show’s sponsors). The backdrops are a
series of distinctive caricatures by Gerald Scarfe, who produced an image of
Jagger in New York magazine that the singer liked so much, it was made into
a T-shirt for the 1994 Voodoo Lounge tour. “I knew there was a connection
there, so I called him up and said, ‘Would you do some drawings?’”
Schaufusssays. “I wanted to do it as a dance concert. You have to bring the
audience to different mountaintops and valleys. This starts and ends with a
recording of their first big gig in London, at the Albert Hall in 1966. It’s
important to have bookends in a piece.”
Satisfaction is an unashamedly commercial work, but then the Stones are one of
the world’s most successful entertainment businesses – and every ballet
company balances the books by staging The Nutcracker at Christmas.
Act II is the better spectacle. It is full of bluesier, obscure covers or
newer songs that only the die-hards know (The Worst, from Voodoo Lounge;
Streets of Love, from A Bigger Bang). They stand or fall on the wit and
imagination of the choreography, not on the audience’s inherited love of
Stones hits. In Mona (I Need You Baby), from the 1965 live recording The
Rolling Stones, Now!, a conga line slowly dissolves as each dancer performs
a solo – tap, gymnastics, body-popping, classic leaps, whatever they want –
accompanied by grunts, howls and even banshee screams.
Maybe it ain’t ballet and only rock’n’roll, but some will like it. As for the
cognoscenti – as the man says, you can’t always get what you want.
Satisfaction, at the Apollo, W1, August 28 to September 8
