Kraanerg (1969)
Kraanerg is a 1968 score for 23 instruments and 4-channel tape by Iannis Xenakis, made as a ballet with choreography by Roland Petit and Op Art set design by Victor Vasarely. It was commissioned for the opening of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, intended to coincide with Expo 67 but delayed until 1969, and it sits in the catalogue as a rare instance of Xenakis working directly for the stage rather than for the concert hall.
What is danced
The source article does not describe the choreographic vocabulary at all. It records only production facts: that Petit was in charge of the premiere staging, that he divided the 75-minute work at its midpoint with an intermission, and that his choreography was judged a critical failure while the score itself was praised. No steps, holds, partnering, or technique are described anywhere in the text, and a second choreography made by Graeme Murphy in 1988 for the Sydney Opera House is mentioned only as a production event (25 performances, conducted by Roger Woodward), again with no movement description.
Context
The article situates the piece among Xenakis's other stage and installation work of the period — he had already scored a 1960 film about Vasarely and was invited by the composer himself into a triad with Vasarely (design) and Lukas Foss (conducting the premiere). Xenakis's own programme note frames the piece not as narrative dance but as an abstract response to the student and youth movements of the late 1960s, envisioning "the imminent biological struggle between generations," which the composer explicitly wanted staged without story or plot. That stance — a full-length ballet score built on confrontation between live orchestra and pre-recorded electroacoustic tape, deliberately emptied of narrative — put it at odds with the kind of choreography Petit was known for, which the article credits as the reason the staging failed even as the music succeeded.
Staging history
The original Petit production toured until 1972, after which the ballet was largely forgotten while the score continued to circulate on its own. It was revived choreographically only once that the article records: in 1988, Australian choreographer Graeme Murphy created a new version with Roger Woodward directing, given 25 performances at the Sydney Opera House, a production the article says drew renewed international attention to the composition. Since then the article notes the music has usually been performed without any ballet at all, which is reflected in a discography running from 1969 through 2008 that is entirely concert/tape recordings rather than dance documentation.
How to watch it
Because Xenakis insisted on no narrative or story, there is no plot to track; attention should go instead to the structural confrontation the article describes between the live instrumentalists and the tape, which shifts in balance across three roughly equal phases (orchestra-and-tape, then mostly orchestra, then mostly tape). The score's twenty-two built-in silences, three of them over twenty seconds, are structurally load-bearing rather than incidental, so a staging that ignores them or fills them with movement is working against the composition's own architecture. Watch for how a given choreographer handles the deliberately un-narrated, Op-Art-adjacent abstraction Vasarely's original designs were meant to underscore.
Credits
- composer: Iannis Xenakis