The Work

Helden / Heroes is Terence Kohler’s two-act meditation on heroism, invention, consequence, and mythic aftershock. Created for the Bayerisches Staatsballett and premiered at the Nationaltheater in Munich, the ballet places heroic language under pressure: not as a stable monument, but as a field of competing forces — fire, knowledge, resistance, desire, and punishment.

The dramaturgical world of the ballet turns around mythic figures associated with Prometheus, Epimetheus, Pandora, and Athena Parthenos. Prometheus becomes the figure of forward motion and invention; Epimetheus, the after-thinker, forms his counterweight. Pandora introduces consequence, while Athena moves between muse, intellect, ideal, and withheld power.

The musical architecture combines Alfred Schnittke with two works by Lera Auerbach: Dreams and Whispers of Poseidon and Eterniday. Within this frame, Auerbach’s music brings the ballet a mythic and elemental register — a sound world of sea-depth, suspended time, ritual weight, and visionary instability.

rosalie’s stage world is inseparable from the choreography. Her kinetic light installation, light objects, stage space, and costumes create an environment in which bodies appear inside luminous machinery: part oracle, part laboratory, part mythological ruin. The heroic body is not isolated from technology and image; it is caught inside them.

In this sense, Helden is not simply a ballet about heroes. It is a ballet about what societies ask heroes to carry — invention, sacrifice, transgression, beauty, progress, and guilt — and about the cost of translating myth into a modern theatre of light.

** Catalogue marker: mixed-composer ballet / dance work including music by Lera Auerbach.

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