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