Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay : 

• Friday, June 21, 2019 - 8:00 pm
• Saturday, June 22, 2019 - 3:00 pm
• Saturday, June 30, 2019 - 8:00 pm 
• Sunday, June 23, 2019 - 3:00 pm  

Created for the Paris Opera Ballet in 2016.
If Approximate Sonata and Artifact Suite entered the Paris Opera Ballets repertoire in 2006, William Forsythe's last creation for the company Pas./parts dates back to 1999. When creating Blake Works 1 in July 2016, the choreographer discovered a new generation of dancers. He chose seven songs from British composer James Blake's album The Colour in Anything, to accompany a ballet which dazzles by its freshness and once again illustrates the way in which William Forsythe plays with classical codes.   

  Léonore Baulac, Marion Barbeau, Germain Louvet, Paul Marque and dansers of the corps de Ballet   

Created for the New York City Ballet in 1970 and entered Paris Opera Ballet's repertory in 1989.
ln the Night is a tributes to Frederic Chopin. Seeking to free the composer from the commonplaces that have often belittled his music, Robbins transforms Les Nocturnes into ln the Night, a long and poetic pas de deux built like a metaphor of love in ail its states.    

First past de deux: Sae-Eun Park and Paul Marque
Second pas de deux: Léonore Baulac and Germain Louvet
Third pas de deux: Audric Bezard and Marion Barbeau

Created for the Paris Opera Ballet in 2016.
For this ballet, Crystal Pite, a former dancer with the Frankfurt Ballet and currently resident choreographer at the Nederlands Dans Theater, draws inspiration from the meticulous observation of natural phenomena as well as the recomposed version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons by composer Max Richter. Max Richter offers a freely recomposed version of Vivaldl's Four Seasons. He concentrates on certain moments of the score and remodels them to create "new objects", superimposing familiar fragments or juxtaposing them ad infinitum to bring new life to a work that has been well-worn by the excessive exploitation it suffers today, "I've only kept 25% of the notes, but Vivaldi's DNA is in every bar. I've retained the forms, the gestures, the textures and the nuances"  

  Marion Barbeau, Héloïse Bourdon and dansers of the corps de Ballet

• Saturday, June 29, 2019 - 7:30 pm 
• Sunday, June 30, 2019 - 2:00 pm 
• Sunday, June 30, 2019 - 7:30 pm 
• Monday, July 1st, 2019 - 7:30 pm  

 2 performances of the mixed bill

• Thursday July 4, 2019 - 7:30 pm 
• Friday, July 5, 2019 - 7:30 pm  

Production créée par le Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris en 1984.
Orchestre symphonique de Shanghaï
Conductor : Valery Ovsyanikov 

Odile/Odette : Léonore Baulac or Sae Eun Park
Le Prince Siegfried : Germain Louvet or Pablo Legasa
Rothbart : Jérémy-Loup Quer or Thomas Docquir  

From Greek mythology (Zeus, the ruler of the gods, assumed the form of a swan to seduce Leda) to the wild romanticism of Ludwig Il of Bavaria (who borrowed from the realms of Wagner the symbolism of the swan which he would exalt to the point of obsession), legends of the beautiful unsullied bird, symbol of inaccessible purity and ambiguous eroticism, abound in Narse and Celtic folklore just as they do in the fables of Russia and Persia  

The vocabulary of mime plays an essential raie in Swan Lake adopting expressions commonly used in pantomime to express sadness (tears) but also love and memories.  

When he came to compose Swan Lake, Tchaikovsky adopted from his predecessors - primarily the French musicians whom he greatly admired (Adolphe Adam for Giselle in 1841, Léo Délibes for Coppélia in 1870 and Sylvia in 1876) - the technique of attributing melodic themes to the principal characters that would recur and develop at their every appearance (leitmotiv) and creating a comprehensive, unified composition with a symphonie character.  

First performed in Moscow in 1877 to a choreography by Reisinger, Swan Lake got off to a precarious start. It was not until 1893 that Ivan Alexandrovitch Vsevolozhsky, director of the Imperial Theatres of Saint Petersburg, began entertaining the idea of restaging Swan Lake with Marius Petipa and Lev lvanov. The two choreographers had previously worked with Tchaikovsky to create The Sleeping Beauty /1890) and The Nutcracker /1892). The new version of Swan Lake was an immediate success. Numerous Russian choreographers would subsequently restage the ballet, including Alexander Gorsky /at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1901), Michel Fokine with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (in 1911), Nicolai Sergeyev (in 1934) and more recently, Alexeï Ratmansky (in 2016).  

ln a more Freudian interpretation of the work, Rudolf Nureyev's version re-evaluates the male raies and gives greater psychological depth to all the characters. The set, conceived by Ezio Frigerio, consists of a closed, unembellished, "frozen· space. lt is also a mental space inside which the Prince can give free rein to his fantasies. When he came to create the painted canvases, the set designer drew inspiration from Claude Monet and his « extraordinary pictorial sensitivity·picturale.»  

BLAKE WORKS I (William Forsythe)
IN THE NIGHT (Jerome Robbins)
THE SEASONS’ CANON (Crystal Pite)