Zurich’s Cosmopolitan Choreography
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Crossposted from Haaretz
Many dance troupes are closely identified with the choreographer and artistic director leading them. But in the case of the Zurich Ballet, it seems that Heinz Spoerli has taken this tendency a step too far. His name appears together with the name of the troupe wherever possible, whether on billboards and in various notices at the troupe’s home base, on the vest he wears, or on the Ballet’s truck in the car park. Spoerli is everywhere, he can’t be missed. Even on the home page of the troupe’s website, among the changing photographs of dancers, his huge portrait suddenly appears.
Spoerli’s troupe, slated to appear in Israel this month, is part of the Zurich Opera House. The Opera’s neoclassical building, a beautiful, elegant edifice of relatively humble dimensions befitting Swiss good taste, graces the banks of Lake Zurich. In the afternoon hours, the building’s lively halls were filled with dancers dressed in athletic outfits and communicating mostly in English, suggesting a cosmopolitan atmosphere.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
