"Mit Oder Ohne" [With or Without] is a contemporary balletic suite that I created for Ballett Schwerin in the '24-'25 season. The 45-minute work navigates the delicate, often contradictory terrain of love: its presence and absence, its ecstasy and ache, its clarity and confusion. Set to chamber arrangements of Felix Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, the work draws on music composed to express the inexpressible—moments of human experience where language falters and emotion finds voice instead in melody.

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Each section is anchored by a poetic text, drawing on the figurative richness of Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrud Kolmar, and Friedrich Schiller to evoke different dimensions of intimacy and human connection. Rilke’s contemplative verse opens the ballet in a meditation on the cyclical nature of love and selfhood, where relationships echo the spiraling movement of inner growth. Kolmar’s darker, more urgent tone frames the central section—a stark and poignant encounter with love as compulsion and vulnerability. The final section reaches outward with Schiller’s ecstatic invocation of joy and unity, offering a fragile but luminous sense of shared humanity.

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Balancing gesture and abstraction, Mit oder Ohne is a ballet of thresholds—between silence and expression, solitude and togetherness, memory and presence. It asks not only what it means to love, but whether love must be defined by the presence of another, or whether it can exist as an echo, a trace, something felt even in absence.

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Recording available upon request.