The dancers of Le Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève are handsome movers. Shown off to pleasing effect in a double bill with choreography by their director Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and artistic associate Damien Jalet, the evening mused on whirling and waltzing. Two pieces that might appear disparate fed in to one another, united in the largesse of resource supplied to their separate dance worlds.
Boléro originally premiered in Paris in 2013, with choreography and concept by Jalet and Cherkaoui and a glamorous design team comprised of Marina Abramović and Riccardo Tisci, former creative director of Givenchy. As a response to Ravel’s insistent, pulsing Boléro, we all revel in the throbbing tension building, though the movement is far from tight.
The dancers perform langourous rotations and revolves, arms following a hypnotic track that catches the dancers own bodies in an orbit that is constantly progressing. The cast begin black-caped, walking stridently downstage towards us, but remove them to reveal nude unitards with cobwebs of lace appliqué that sketch out the human skeleton. This is a dance of life and death, though by its conclusion, we feel these dancers aren’t temporal at all. Thanks to Abramović’s concept and lighting by Urs Schöebaum, this isn’t a world the dancers inhabit – it seems like the dancers are shards of a kaleidoscope, a mirror at the back of the stage multiplying their numbers.
The constant whirling of Boléro was a portent to Cherkaoui’s second act. Bal Impérial is a multi-layered work that challenges its viewer. Commissioned to commemorate the bicentenary of Austrian composer Johann Strauss’ birth, and co-produced with Johann Strauss 2025 Wien and Eastman Dance Company, we’re told Cherkaoui aims to question the nature of balls, exploring dance whose social conventions conceal political implications – ballet, after all, was originally a political device veiled as opulent entertainment for European royalty.
Within that context, Cherkaoui succeeds in presenting cogent images that puzzle in their strangeness, but reveal much in the furtive glance between partners. Strauss’ music (conducted by Constantin Trinks) evokes the world of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and Cherkaoui interrogates the nature of cultural imperialism by juxtaposing Vienna and its stringent social conventions with Japan.
Three Japanese musicians weave themselves throughout the piece, at times masters of ceremony, agitators, and commentators. These contrasting cultural elements, triumphantly highlighted in Tim Yip’s designs, are in bold conversation with one another. What is familiar to one is weird to the other, but the macabre intersections are what linger.
Opening with a single performer and what appears to be a samurai sword, the disquieting tone of violence chimes from the outset. A line up of eleven men join the stage apparently fighting one another, though it has the ceremony of a ritual dance. What intrigues is that one man doesn’t have a partner, continuing the rite opposite a phantom. This shade moves along the formation changing partners, another way something sinister lies just below the surface of the luxurious dancescape we are observing.
Group dances with complex rhythmical footwork abound, interspersed by harrowing solos: Dylan Phillips stunned with writhing acrobatic movement. You get a good sense of Bal Impérial’s movement vocabulary if you see Cherkaoui’s dances in Joe Wright’s 2012 film adaptation of Anna Karenina; waltzing fused with modern flavours akin to hip hop or vogueing, things you might see in the famous queer balls of New York in the 1980s.
The brief to commemorate Strauss could have descended into cliché for another choreogapher – you felt the audience flutter when perhaps Strauss’ most famous waltz, The Blue Danube, started up. But Cherkaoui’s ambitious probing of dance as political instrument was thought provoking. Its daring aligned itself with the waltz’s original reception as a provocative, dizzying new craze when it burst into Hapsburg ballrooms.
Similarly unsettling, Bal Impérial is suffused with darkness. One haunting episode sees the assembled female-presenting dancers turn into a firing squad aimed at the audience, and the dancers appear like supernatural Japanese figures studded with fiery eyes towards the work’s conclusion. Sometimes we don’t understand what’s happening, but that feels like the point. Whilst the dance unfolds, sat in a glamorous house like the Grand Théâtre de Genève, Cherkaoui’s achievement is to make us wonder what might be whirling underneath, whilst we’re all distracted by the waltz.
Daniel's trip was sponsored by Le Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève
