Founded in Tel-Aviv in 1964, the Batsheva Dance Company has been headed since 1990 by Ohad Naharin : an incredible dancer with a musical training, who has a true passion for movement. Through his "Gaga" technique, a choreographic vocabulary that explores the sensations and the availability of the bodies, he made his mark on the dance world and offered the company its finest hours. In 2015, Tomer Heymann's documentary "Mr. Gaga" paid tribute to the Naharin phenomenon, its influence on the contemporary dance scene and in pop culture. This diptych aims to broaden the Batsheva videography by, as a showcase of Naharin's aesthetics and demanding technique, featuring two of the most emblematic works in the company's current repertoire, both filmed in Paris: Naharin's Virus and Last Work .
A carefully negotiated balance between frenzy and meditation, a frail and unstable whole saturated with an enigmatic opacity and symbolism, Last Work is also a politically committed, ethically-charged piece reflecting on war, peace, oppression and coercion. While dance is stretched up to its limits, Naharin's choreographic gesture calls for a new outlook on our contemporary world, its violence, its possibilities, its future.
A sparkling personality on the contemporary dance scene, Swedish choreographer Alexander Ekman has been invited for the first time to work with the dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet. His language, both visceral and tinged with humour, combining theatricality, and classical and contemporary vocabulary alike, perfectly resonates with the incredible versatility and stage presence of the Ballet: the result is Play , a piece that evokes the world of childhood and its careless pleasures. But beyond pure entertainment, this performance contemplates the meaning and the importance of play when we become adults...
Best known for the spectacular quality of his pieces and their dreamlike imagery, like for instance his Midsummer Night's Dream , the Swedish choreographer fills the stage of the Palais Garnier with an entrancing energy. The metallic structures, dancers suspended in space, and the elevations are but a few of the powerful images that will strike the audience's imagination!
For this new creation, Alexander Ekman worked with his acolyte composer Mikael Karlsson , but also with a talented team of instrumentalists not often seen on the stage of the Palais Garnier, among which gospel singer Callie Day, or the incredible drums and marimba player Adelaide Ferriere. An...
A breath of fresh air is blowing over the Ural Opera Ballet with this new version of Paquita , halfway between tradition and modernity!
A festive ballet recounting the thwarted loves of a gypsy and an officer, Paquita marked the debut of Marius Petipa in Saint Petersburg. But only the last scene of the ballet, the famous Grand pas Classique, remained in the companies' repertoire. Thanks to a careful reconstruction, the Ural Opera Ballet finally revives the original version in three acts.
The product of methodical research by expert Sergei Vikharev and former Principal Vyacheslav Samodurov, the choreography scrupulously recreates Petipa's 1881 version, according to notes kept at the Harvard Theater Collection. The original score has been rearranged by the famous Saint Petersburg composer, Yuri Krasavin .
But if this new production uses the original libretto of the ballet, it nonetheless transposes it in time. The result is a show of great relevance, which brings up to date the strong political and social substrate of the original plot by illustrating it with artistic references gleaned throughout the 20th century. A powerful theatrical experience, crowned with the jury's special award of the "Golden Masks" in 2019.
Just Dance the Steps is a personal portrait of the Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen in the run-up to his 90th birthday. For over five years director Willem Aerts followed ad observed this intentionally acclaimed master of contemporary ballet during his life and work at Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam, in the studio of the Ballett am Rhein in Dusseldorf and at Nederlands Dans Theater in The Hague. This powerful tribute and inspirational portrayal looks back at van Manen's remarkable artistic legacy, and documents a life that remains inseparable from dance and choreography.
As the hero of the opera, Don Giovanni is the denominator of the piece, he gives it its name as the hero usually does, but he does more than this: he is the common denominator. Compared to his existence, all others are merely derivative. So wrote the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, who, like many others, was fascinated by Mozart's 1787 opera. "It is this absolute centrality that makes this work exercise the power of illusion more than any other. Does this work, the second joint venture by Mozart and the librettist Da Ponte, need any further introduction? This 'dramma giocoso' can hardly be categorised: opera seria, opera buffa? - Don Giovanni is universal, enigmatic, superhuman, mythical. After Cosi fan tutte and La Clemenza di Tito, Ludovic Morlot will conduct his third opera by Mozart at La Monnaie. For those who are familiar with Warlikovski's approach, it will come as no surprise that Don Giovanni will be presented as a dark, desperate character.
Mozart was not yet seventeen when Lucio Silla was created in Milan one December evening of 1772, yet we can still distinguish in this youthful composition some of the elements that established the exceptionally-gifted child musician as the greatest composer of all times. Indeed, with Lucio Silla, although a neoclassical "opera seria" in every way, it seems that Mozart was already learning to deconstruct and to free the traditional forms of musical drama from archaic conventions. We can also identify in this work an aesthetic premise that Mozart didn't formulate until ten years later: it falls to music only to express and to reveal the psychological depths of the characters; and the poetry in the libretto should only be its "obedient daughter".
The opera is centered around the love roman dictator Lucio Silla bears for his enemy's daughter Giunia, who favours the exiled senator Cecilio as the object of her affection. After many twists and turns, the lovers are united in marriage and Silla renounces his crown.
Tenor Kurt Streit is Lucio Silla, and soprano Patricia Petibon is Giunia for the last time, after having gained international recognition thanks to her numerous performances in this role, while mezzo-soprano Silvia Tro Santafe is the ardent Cecilio. In this monumental...
These musings by Mozart on life and death were the starting point for Raphael Pichon and Romeo Castellucci's interpretation of the composer's emblematic unfinished Requiem . An expression of humankind's existential dread in the face of mortality, this requiem mass confronts us with the transience of nature and culture, of humankind and of the individual.
'We should understand and celebrate the end as the other side of a party, where the dance carries on. This Missa pro defunctis is thus transposed and its meaning changed.' Thanks to Castellucci's theatrical vision and the musical dramaturgy by Pichon, who supplements the work with other religious pieces by Mozart, this Requiem becomes the ultimate celebration of life.
Jean-Philippe Rameau's Platee is a masterpiece of the French operatic repertoire and was highly regarded by critics during the composer's lifetime. Composed for the marriage of the Dauphin Louis, son of Louis XV, to the Infanta Maria Teresa of Spain, it was first performed at Versailles in 1745 and became an instant hit.
The plot revolves around the ugly and conceited frog Platee, the victim of a machination of the gods who make her believe that she is loved by Jupiter. Is this Rameau mocking Princess Maria Teresa of Spain - reputedly a woman of little beauty? Or the French court, which saw itself as a new Olympus?
This classic production from the Opera national de Paris by Marc Minkowski and Laurent Pelly returns to the stage with an entirely new cast, featuring Julie Fuchs, Mathias Vidal, Jean Teitgen and Lawrence Brownlee in the title-role.
An emancipated slave, the Chevalier de Saint-George managed to elevate himself to the highest spheres of the Enlightened 18th-century French society, thanks to his incredible accomplishments as a fencer, horseman, and musician. From the Guadeloupe where he was born, to Paris and Versailles where he made a name for himself, to Lille that he defended against the royalists during the French Revolution, he quickly became one of the most important characters in both the musical and the military scenes. Through his compositions, testimonies from specialists and secrets shared by some of his best interprets, this film narrates his extraordinary adventures.
In Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky's last opera Iolanta , a blind princess is searching for the source of her sadness and finds love. In Igor Stravinsky's neoclassical one-act buffa Mavra , an ingenious young woman has a risky idea and smuggles her lover, disguised as a cook, into her mother's house.
Stage director Axel Ranisch interweaves those two works, resulting in a coming-a-of-age fairy tale on family, love, knowledge and self-determination: Mavra and Iolanta are becoming Mavra/Iolanta .
Out of Giuseppe Verdi's adoration for William Shakespeare three masterpieces were born: Macbeth, Otello and, as a musical testament, his only comedy Falstaff . But in accordance with its librettist Arrigo Boito's wish to remove the original bourgeois farce The Merry Wives of Windsor out of the English mists and to warm it up to the clear Tuscan sun, Falstaff transforms Shakespeare's morality play into an ode to life, to pleasure and to reconciliation that forgives human vices, rewards intelligence and virtue, and praises that spark of madnessthat gives life its flavour. Shakespeare's most famous and subversive comic character has indeed proved to be a fertile ground for Verdi who, then eighty-years old, signed with Falstaff his most modern, most ambitious, but also wisest and ambiguous opera.
It was high time that French stage director Laurent Pelly, an eniment specialist of the buffa repertoire, tried out his talents on this whimsical music drama: a task he performs with absolute maestria, highlighting with remarkable subtlety the numerous comic devices invented by Verdi and Boito but also pondering on the equivocal morality of the argument. He is, of course, helped in this endeavour by a wonderful team of singers: from the excellent baritone Roberto de Candia to the...
