15 September 2023

Marc Hollogne takes the BBL on board with Nivagation

Six years after making Maurice Béjart interact with his company’s dancers in Dixit, the Belgian director returns to the Béjart Ballet Lausanne to create a new Cinema-Dance-Theater show: Nivagation, choreographed by Gil Roman, which will premiere at the Beaulieu Theater in Lausanne from December 16 to 22. The program also features two ballets by Maurice Béjart: Concerto in D and Adage pour deux.

The Belgian artist and filmmaker Marc Hollogne has more than one trick up his sleeve… Six years after creating Dixit, a show where the Béjart Ballet Lausanne interacted with its creator through the magic of Cinema-Theater, a process he developed in the early 1980s, the director writes a new show for the company combining reality and the virtual: Nivagation. The show is a rambling as much as a navigational experience.

This “Cinema-Dance-Theater”, choreographed by the Artistic Director of the BBL, takes us on a fantastic initiation voyage. The world premiere will run from December 16 to 22 at the Beaulieu Theater in Lausanne, under the guidance of the author. Concerto in D, and Adage pour deux, an extract from Maurice Béjart’s Malraux ou la Métamorphose des dieux, will complete the program.

“A film is projected on a big screen”, explains Marc Hollogne. “We’re in a movie theater. It shows the daily life of a worn-out, broken worker. Something throws him back into his past. A painful past. The screen rises. The worker escapes. We’re in a theater. Dancers appear. They continue the story. The art of dance and picture complement each other.”

The BBL will perform Concerto in D as the opening act for the first time since 2002. Maurice Béjart set this ballet to Igor Stravinsky’s score, with no anecdote or message other than “the harmonious relationships of time and space”, as he wrote at the time: “shapes that never stand wind and unfold around subtle melodies and rhythmic constructions, and, in the midst of this “game”, there is an instrument that is both tender and virtuoso, technically brilliant and sensual, a woman: a dancer. Last but not least, Adage pour deux is the icing on the cake: a pas de deux borrowed from Malraux ou la Métamorphose des dieux, first performed in 1986 at the Cirque Royal in Brussels, to the music of Ludwig van Beethoven.