Heinz SPOERLI
Dance Maker

Of course, his passport and his business cards give a different professional designation, but Heinz Spoerli prefers Dance Maker to all other titles because, as he explains, "this title most accurately describes my passion, my motivation and my creative work."

Born in Basel in 1940, Spoerli has been a dance maker since 1967. In those days he danced with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet in Canada: one of a half dozen stations along a successful but not truly brilliant career path as a dancer which began in his home city in 1960. On eof those way-stations was Cologne, where in 1963 he met the American choreographer Tod Bolender, who engaged him for the company in the far-off wastelands of the Canadian west. He spent three years dancing with the Grands Ballets Canadiens in Montreal, returning there after a short guest appearance in Basel in 1969/70 before finally, in 1971, settling in Switzerland. At the theatre in Geneva, which not only offered him a job as a dancer, but allowed him the opportunity to work as a choreographer, he promptly produced his first really professional ballet, Le Chemin, which was to mark a fortuitous turn of events in two ways. Werner Düggelin, then theatre director in Basel, saw the televised recording of it and immediately offered the 30-year-old dance master a contract as Ballet Director.

Spoerli stayed in Basel for seventeen years, developing the ensemble into one of the leading classical ballet companies in Europe and working with incredible dedication as a choreographer. Up to six to eight one-act ballets per season were the rule rather than the exception, and from 1976 onwards he added his own full-length ballets to the repertory. A measured, intelligent approach to revising the classic ballets became the field in which Spoerli built up his reputation over a number of years.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Spoerli began to find his native city of Basel too confined. It took him five years to transform the rundown ballet company of the German Opera on the Rhine in Düsseldorf into one of the leading classical ensembles in Germany. One of his most important choreographic achievements during this period was a lucid dance version of Johann Sebastian Bach's piano cycle, the "Goldberg Variations". But when Zurich offered him the opportunity of taking over the most important Swiss ballet company in 1996, nothing could keep him in Düsseldorf. As the director of the Zurich Ballet, Spoerli has since consolidated his reputation as one of the European continent's leading choreographers. On the occasion of his 60th birthday in the autumn of 2000, he founded a trust which was intended "to make a general contribution towards preserving dance as an art form and to promote public interest therein". In order to consolidate his company's foundations, he also set up the Junior Ballet for young dancers. Spoerli's 2007 Zurich Ballet has 54 dancers (18 more than when he started in 1996), including 14 junior dancers and four éleves.

Over the years, Heinz Spoerli's restless spirit has inspired important initiatives that remain in existence long after Spoerli has turned his attention to new ideas - for example, the "Basel Dances" festival, which Spoerli founded during his time in Basel and directed once more from Zurich; or the Swiss Professional Ballet School, which led a rather humdrum existence until Spoerli restructured it over a three-year period. On the board of the Nureyev Foundation since May 2004, "dance maker" Spoerli has choreographed Berio and Schnittke, Ligeti and Brahms, Ravel and Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky and Richard Strauss, plus two full-length ballets to music by Mozart and Bach, not forgetting marvellous interpretations of Schubert's C Major Quintet and Mahler's Fifth Symphony. He has revived one of his early masterworks, La belle vie created for the Basel company, and brought it into the Zurich repertory. He has choreographed new versions of classics like Giselle, Romeo and Juliet, The Nutcracker, Cinderella, Coppelia, La fille mal gardée, Swan Lake and last but not least a version of Don Quixote which according to the doyen of ballet critics Horst Koegler is the closest thing to ballet heaven. He has had the courage to approach Rameau's grandiose ballet-opera Les Indes galantes in co-production with the opera house, and taken his company on tour to Tokyo and Beijing, London and Paris, Hong Kong and Taipei, Cape Town and Singapore, Edinburgh - and even into the lion's den, the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. And wherever he goes, he earns the highest accolades both for his choreography and the high technical standard of his dancers. In the year 2007 it is undisputed that the Zurich Ballet is one of Europe's leading ballet companies.

Jochen Schmidt