Paradox

I arrived in Stuttgart on August 28, 1968 by train from Prague. 
It was the last train allowed to leave Czechoslovakia after the 
Soviet occupation which started one week earlier on August 21st. 
This invasion of the "Warsaw pact forces", lead by the Soviet 
Union, crushed the attempt of Alexander Dubček to create a 
"Communist regime with a human face". Straight after my arrival 
in Stuttgart I was taken to the director of the Stuttgart Ballet, 
John Cranko. He received me in a very small room of his very 
large house playing a card game called "Solitaire". He was 
very sympathetic to the plight of the Czech people as well as 
to me. "Paradox" was created in 1970 for the “Noverre Society”. 
This society of dance enthusiasts was founded by Fritz Höver 
in 1958, but it also became a platform for the company's 
dancers who needed to express their creative talents and who 
wanted to present themselves as potential future professional 
choreographers. I was one of them. Driven by my ambition, 
I wrote the music, played it on the piano, made the choreography 
and also performed it with my South African girlfriend Leigh-Ann 
Griffiths. Of course we danced it with great vigor and engagement 
and despite the fact that I had a terribly inflamed and swollen 
knee, it became a success. Not only John Cranko liked it, but 
also Margot Fonteyn, the great British ballerina, who was a guest 
artist performing with the Stuttgart Ballet at that time. She invited 
us to perform the piece at the London Collegiate Theatre under 
the hospices of the "Choreographic society" run by Lesley Edwards.
    

	
	
We were supposed to leave for London shortly, but at that time 
I was a refugee and I didn't have a proper passport. I only had 
a "stateless document" which didn't allow me to travel anywhere. 
For every trip I had to apply for a visa. But to obtain such thing 
at the time of the "cold war" was quite a challenge. It could take 
weeks, if ever granted at all. But there was a British consulate 
in Stuttgart and the consul's name was Ian Bell, a Scotsman. 
Margot Fonteyn approached him with the request to issue a visa 
for me as soon as possible. Everything was fixed within days. 
Leigh-Ann and myself travelled to London and performed our 
"Paradox" to a satisfactory result and returned to Stuttgart 
unscathed... The piece is simple but in a strange way it still 
resonates with me. There is no doubt that it was influenced by 
my experiences of the crashing of the "Prague spring reforms", 
but the meaning of the work is very simple: two individuals live 
their lives, they orbit each other and become attracted. The more 
involved they become the more hostile becomes their environment. 
In circular movements they try to come closer and closer to one 
another but they start drifting apart until they totally loose sight 
of one other. I remember, that there were many circular movements 
in the choreography but only now I realize that they probably 
represented the never ending conflict between gravity and the 
centrifugal force.

                    Jiří Kylián - The Hague, May 22, 2020