Triple Bill
Tous les hommes presque toujours s'imaginent
| Choreography Gil Roman |
| Music John Zorn |
| Scenario and video collaborator Marc Hollogne |
| Costume design Henri Davila |
| Lighting design Dominique Roman |
Photo: BBL - Gregory Batardon
Photo: BBL - Ilia Chkolnik
John Zorn is one of the leading composers of contemporary American music. The density and diversity of his extraordinary work, which began in the mid-1970s, as well as the audacity and artistic freedom he expressed through his craft, never ceased to challenge and fascinate the artistic director of the Béjart Ballet Lausanne. It was written that a meeting between the avant-garde musician and the choreographer would happen...
January 2016, the Village, New York. The two artists exchange for the first time about their respective artistic experiences, cultural heritage, and desire to transcend it and free themselves from it in order to push back the boundaries of art. The conversation is meaningful, rich, and passionate. Naturally, Gil Roman shares with him his desire to use his music for one of his ballets. The appointment is set....
2018, the Béjart Ballet Lausanne studio, Lausanne. Facing a considerable body of work, Gil Roman immerses himself in the various compositions making up the universe that the brilliant multi-instrumentalist has explored from 1990 to 2017... Step by step, with a movement, a gesture, Gil Roman brings his dancers beyond the walls...
Brel et Barbara
| Choreography Maurice Béjart |
| Music Jacques Brel, Barbara |
| Costume design Jean-Paul Knott |
| Lighting design Dominique Roman |
Photo: BBL - Didier Philispart
Photo: BBL - Gregory Batardon
For the last 35 years, my loyal friend and sister BARBARA has been telling me: "I am the black light!" So I created a choreography about L'Aigle Noir. She then played in a movie called Je suis né à Venise, in which she was given the lead role, a character called the Bright Night, while Jorge Donn interpreted the Sun.
I met BREL in Brussels, where I was living at the time with my dance company. He was starring in Man of La Mancha at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie. He told me that "Someday, we will do something with Barbara and I"...
Maurice Béjart
Boléro
| Choreography Maurice Béjart |
| Music Maurice Ravel |
| Stage design and costumes Maurice Béjart |
| Lighting Dominique Roman |
Photos: BBL - Laurent Philippe
Photos: BBL - Ilia Chkolnik
"My Boléro," commented Ravel, "has to stick in one's head!"
More seriously, he explained:
"In 1928, upon request by Madame Rubinstein (Ida Rubinstein, the famous Russian actress and dancer), I composed a Bolero for an orchestra. This is a dance with a very moderate and continuously even movement, both due to its melody and to its harmony and rhythm. The rhythm is continuously marked by the drum. The element of diversity is added by the orchestral crescendo."
Maurice Béjart describes the creation of Ravel's work in these terms, "music that is too well-known and yet still fresh due to its simplicity. A melody (originally oriental and not Spanish) that winds slowly around itself, increasing in volume and intensity, devours the sound space and swallows it up at the end of the melody."
Without further describing a ballet that needs no introduction, let us simply point out that Maurice Béjart returns to the spirit of The Rite of Spring in a very different style. In this sense, unlike most artists who have illustrated Boléro choreographically before him, he spurns the easy choices of a picturesque exterior to simply - but so forcefully - express the essential.
Maurice Béjart gives the central role (La Mélodie) sometimes to a female dancer and other times to a male dancer. The rhythm is interpreted by a group of male dancers.
Photo: BBL - François Paolini
Ballet for Life
| Choreography Maurice Béjart |
| Music Queen, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart |
| Costume design Gianni Versace |
| Lighting design Clément Cayrol |
| Lighting Dominique Roman |
| Video editing Germaine Cohen |
Photo: BBL - Gregory Batardon
Photo: BBL - Ilia Chkolnik
Ballet for Life, created by the late visionary choreographer Maurice Béjart, returns to Japan in live performances by the Béjart Ballet Lausanne for the first time since 2008. Béjart choreographed the ballet to the music of Queen and Mozart, with costumes by Gianni Versace to celebrate the lives and talents of legendary performers Freddie Mercury and Maurice Béjart's former principal dancer, Jorge Donn, both of whom died of AIDS at the age of 45. The ballet was first performed in 1997 in Paris, in the presence of Madame Chirac, Elton John and the three surviving members of Queen, John Deacon, Brian May and Roger Taylor.
Ballet for Life has long been loved by the fans in Japan since its Japan premiere by the Béjart Ballet Lausanne in 1998, and it will be the ballet's fifth tour to the country. Fans in Japan and beyond simply cannot miss this great opportunity!
Photo: BBL - Ilia Chkolnik
Photo: BBL - Ilia Chkolnik
A little over thirty years ago, in between Berlioz surprising music interspersed with bombing and the sound of machine guns, an unconventional Friar Lawrence cried out to Jorge Donn and Hitomi Asakawa: "Make love, not war!"
Today, Gil Roman, who is about the same age as the creation of my Romeo and Juliet, surrounded by dancers who have never seen this ballet, answers: "You told us to make love, not war. We made love. Why is love waging war on us?"
A cry from the youth, for whom the problem of death by Love is added to the multiple wars that have never ceased in the world since the so-called END of the last World War!
Above all, my ballets are encounters: with music, with life, with death, with love... with all those, whose life and works find a renewal within me. Moreover, the dancer who I am no longer is reincarnated each time by the dancers who surpass this former self.
A love affair with the music by Queen. Invention, violence, humour, love: it's all there. I love the group. They inspire me and guide me, sometimes through this no man's land where we will all go one day and where, I am sure, Freddie Mercury is playing a duet on the piano with Mozart.
A ballet about youth and hope, as hopeless and optimistic as they are. Despite everything, I believe that "the show must go on", as Queen put it in one of their songs.
Maurice Béjart
Music by Queen
It's a Beautiful Day
Time
Let Me Live
Brighton Rock
Heaven for Everyone
I Was Born to Love You
A Kind of Magic
Get Down, Make Love
Seaside Rendezvous
The Prophet's Song
You Take My Breath Away
Radio Ga Ga
A Winter's Tale
The Great Pretender
The Millionaire Waltz
Love of My Life
Bohemian Rhapsody
I Want to Break Free
The Show Must Go On
Music by Mozart
Così fan tutte
Thamos, King of Egypt
Piano Concerto No. 21
Masonic Funeral Music, K. 477
Sinfonia concertante K.364
Album Made in Heaven
Sketch by Gianni Versace
Freddie Mercury
Photo: Snowdon
Jorge Donn
