For choreographers, ballet music has never ceased to be a source of inexhaustible inspiration offering a plethora of new readings and personal interpretations.

For their first production for the Opera Ballet, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Damien Jalet and visual and performance artist Marina Abramović, return to a legendary work of the 20th century, Maurice Ravel’s Boléro.

Their creation is presented together with three existing ballets: The Firebird / L’Oiseau de feu (Maurice Béjart), L’après-midi d’un faune (Vaslav Nijinsky) and Afternoon of a Faun (Jerome Robbins).

If The Firebird, adapted from a traditional Russian tale, was initially written by Stravinsky for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Maurice Béjart proposed a remarkable vision of Michel Fokine's libretto in 1970 and composed an impassioned work for the Opera Ballet that was an ode to life and all that is ideal. The ballet, drawing its inspiration from the theme of the Phenix, shines forth with powerful and fiery body movement.

In 1912, Nijinsky seized on Mallarmé and Debussy's Faune for the theme of his first choreographic work. The unbridled eroticism of his ballet caused a scandal and catapulted dance into the modern era. Forty years later, without renouncing this heritage, Jerome Robbins offered another interpretation of the work, imagining a sensual and arousing pas de deux in the intimacy of a dance rehearsal studio.