Heinz Spoerli

Heinz Spoerli (born 8 July 1940) is a Swiss dance maker, internationally known. After a long career as a ballet dancer and company director, he is now widely considered to be one of the foremost European choreographers of his time.

Born in Basel into a prosperous family, Heinz Spörli was exposed to theater arts at an early age, thanks to the enthusiasm of his father. As a schoolboy, he appeared as an extra in a number of local productions and sometimes took small acting or dancing roles. At age 17, he began taking ballet classes with Walter Kleiber, a well-known local teacher, while continuing his formal education. Upon graduation from school, he completed his compulsory military service in the Swiss Army before resuming his dance training. Realizing his natural talent for ballet and hoping to make it his career, he devoted himself to his ballet classes and to his studies in dance, music, and art history. During this time, he changed the spelling of his surname from Spörli to Spoerli.

Despite his late start, Spoerli advanced rapidly in his dance training, and in 1960, at age 19, he was engaged as an artist of the Basel Municipal Theater, directed by Vaslav Orlikovsky. He continued to improve his classical technique while appearing in operas, operettas, and the spectacular ballet productions that Orlikovsky mounted. In 1963 Spoerli joined the Cologne State Opera Ballet, directed by Todd Bolender. There he was exposed to an international repertory of high caliber, including works of Balanchine, Béjart, Cranko, de Mille, and Lander. In 1966 he moved to Canada, having been hired as a soloist by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, directed by Arnold Spohr. The following year, 1967, he made his first choreographies, two short pas de deux for the Calgary Ballet Company. After a brief stint back in Cologne, he returned to Canada in late 1967 as a soloist with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in Montreal. There, under the direction of Ludmilla Chiriaeff and Fernand Nault, he danced in both classical and modern works by Dolin, Lichine, Nault, Paige, Kuch, and Butler. In 1969 Spoerli returned to Switzerland, where he danced as a soloist with the Basel Ballet, directed by Pavel Smok, and then with the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, directed by Alfonso Catá. In Geneva from 1970 to 1973 he again danced in works by Balanchine and other prominent neoclassical choreographers. There, in 1972, he also made his first major ballet, Le Chemin ("The Road"), set to an electronic score that had been commissioned from Éric Gaudibert.

The success of Le Chemin led to Spoerli's appointment as resident choreographer of the Basel Ballet in 1973 and as ballet director of the Basel Municipal Theater in 1978. Working in his hometown for almost two decades, he elevated the artistic and technical standards of the company dancers to a remarkable degree and created many works for ballet stages, for opera and operetta, and for television productions. During his tenure the Basel Ballet was recognized as one of the foremost ballet companies in all of Europe. In the autumn of 1991 Spoerli left Basel to become the director of the Rhine Opera Ballet, the resident company for Düsseldorf and Duisberg, Germany. The large roster of dancers in this company allowed him to mount productions on a grander scale than had been possible in Basel, and he took full advantage of the opportunity, creating some of his most memorable works during his sojourn in Germany. In 1996 he returned to Switzerland to assume the post of artistic director and choreographer of the Zurich Ballet. There he assembled one of the finest ensembles of dancers in Europe and continued to present his audiences with bold new productions.

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