The Belgian dancer and choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui interprets Gluck’s late Baroque opera Alceste as an impressive symbiosis between dance and music. The opera “can be experienced here in all its existential power.“ (SZ) It is here performed in the revised Paris version from 1776 where Gluck has revalued especially the ballet music. Cherkaoui – director of the Royal Ballet of Flanders – has worked with top artists across disciplines like superstar Beyoncé. The superb dancers of the Belgian Compagnie Eastman, Antwerp perform Gluck’s score physically, creating a fine and stringent aesthetics of “beautiful images” (Opernwelt). Dorothea Röschmann with her “inimitable charisma” (Financial Times) and Charles Castronovo deliver a brilliant performance in the roles of the self-sacrificing royal couple. “Musically impressive.“ (NMZ)
Ukiyo-e
Ukiyo-e, or how to survive together in a world constantly in crisis? A meditation on our capacity for resilience, this new piece by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is named after the “images of the floating world”, the famous artistic movement that emerged in Japan during the Edo period, in the half-worlds of urban hedonism. The piece activates a work of balance in the face of impermanence. Beyond dualities, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui proposes to envisage bodies that do not end with fracture and limit, but rather to exalt these as augmentations of our person. Alexander Dodge’s set will feature a network of impossible staircases in which the dancers get lost. These mobile labyrinthine structures are intended to evoke both the ascent and the abyss. “Meditative, floor-based, soft and flowing dances that are among the most beautiful that contemporary dance holds.” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)