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"Aubade", the introvert and dark piece between two fast and flashy ballets, was choreographed by Stuttgart's principal dancer Douglas Lee. He came to the company in 1996 directly from the RBS and is a wonderful, sensitive dancer-actor (and certainly the most handsome Romeo ever seen on a ballet stage). "Aubade" is his fifth ballet for Stuttgart. It was inspired by Philip Larkin's poem of the same name, which opposed to "serenade" (evening song) means "morning song". But maybe "night song" would have been the better name for this gloomy ballet set to string music by modern Danish composer Per Noergaard. Lee's choreographic vocabulary is inventive, no question, and he listens closely to the music. His personal trademark are the signs of an existential fatigue: drooping shoulders, round backs, knees that are bent inward, lowered heads. Although "Aubade" has some kind of story - the central character, danced by Jorge Nozal, finds a partner (Bridget Breiner) and loses her to the group - it looks rather static and fatalistic, and it reminds just a little too much of Lee's last ballet "Cindys Gift". Even in the entwining, complicated pas de deux, the dancers never lift their eyes to each other, there is no moment of despair or redemption, just dark brooding. Lee's ballets are depressive, exhausting, and anything else but crowd-pleasing. It's hard to say why, on the second view, you find a grain of dark fascination in them - maybe it's that universal sadness, a hopelessness accepted without resistance. Maybe it would have looked like that if Sartre had made ballets.

Before and after, it's the complete contrary. Fast, cool high-speed dancing in which the young Stuttgart dancers revel and shine with a big enthusiasm for new choreography and different styles of movement. Kevin O'Days "dreamdeepdown" was made for Stuttgart in 2001 to electronic music by John King that resembles the Thom Willems music Forsythe liked to use. Relying more on Balanchine's aesthetic sense of clear lines than on Forsythe's fragmented style, O'Days athletic and fast ballet takes up the surreal proceedings of a dream - he's playing with the speed, delaying some the movement to slow-motion suddenly, he brings in short fragments of action or starts to tell stories that end immediately. The seventeen dancers are led by Sue Jin Kang, Ivan Gil Ortega, Douglas Lee and Eric Gauthier.

Kevin O'Day is now ballet director in Mannheim, just one hour away from Stuttgart, having turned down the same job in Berlin. Already for his first ballet "Delta Inserts" in 1999, Reid Anderson was praised for bringing a new, interesting choreographer to the German ballet scene, and the same seems to be the case with his newest discovery Wayne McGregor. Having worked with classical dancers from the RB and the ENB on pas de deux and smaller pieces, McGregor here suddenly was offered the opportunity to use twenty-four classical dancers for his ballet, twelve soloists and a corps of twelve. In futuristic, turquoise beach fashionwear by Ursula Bombshell they move among a forest of bright blue neon columns. Michael Gordon's fast Minimal Music, an excerpt of the video opera "Weather" for strings and electronic technology, is played live by the orchestra, mixed with electronic thunder and rain. So not only the name "Nautilus" suggests water, being derived either from the sea shell or from Jules Verne's famous first submarine.

Wayne McGregor resembles Kevin O'Day because he doesn't invent something new - they both take the movement repertory they found in neoclassical ballet, use it, exploit it and mix it up. And they open this dance language for other kinds of movement and bring in different kinds of activity, meaningful or not - arms that meander like detached from the body, hands that attack the face of their owner in a pacman-like way, or hips that shift like in a robot against the upper body. But whereas Kevin O'Day only plays with this "foreign" elements like karate blows or duck waddle, whereas he uses them as short ironic quotations or hints, the machine-like impulse is an integral part of Wayne McGregors choreographic language. We may have seen almost every movement in "Nautilus" before, but we surely haven't seen them in such a vertiginous combination, with such continuous high voltage. There is no slowing down here, McGregor keeps the breathless drive for the whole ballet, increasing it even with the nervous flashes of the Minimal Music. And there is no irony, everything looks serious in an abstract, machine-like, driven way. Alexander Zaitsev and Eric Gauthier look like androids moved by remote-control, Diana Martinez Morales crouches restlessly on the floor like an artifical spider woman with endless legs, and the whole company moves in a classical, geometrical pattern towards the audience like an ominous army of cloned warriors. It's pure, fast movement, providing something like the contrary of dance theatre's mere expressionism - and it's one possible future way for modern ballet. Judging by the reaction of the Stuttgart audience, it's exactly the right way. Wayne McGregor was the star of the evening and couldn't quite believe all the cheering and applause. The reviews for his ballet were enthusiastic, from "breathtaking" to "Finally a new choreographic discovery" to "More of that please!".