Ballet for Life by Maurice Béjart at Chorégies d’Orange
Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the show initially scheduled in July 2020 has been postponed to July 22, 2021. As part of the Chorégies d’Orange Festival, the company will present Ballet for Life by Maurice Béjart. To the music of Queen, Mozart and costumes designed by Versace, this ballet is about youth and hope in tribute to Jorge Donn and Freddie Mercury. The choreography is a reflection on life, death and love.
“A little over thirty years ago, in between Berlioz surprising music interspersed with bombing and the sound of machine guns, an unconventional Friar Lawrence cried out to Jorge Donn and Hitomi Asakawa: “Make love, not war!”
Today, Gil Roman, who is about the same age as the creation of my Romeo and Juliet, surrounded by dancers who have never seen this ballet, answers: “You told us to make love, not war. We made love. Why is love waging war on us?”
A cry from the youth, for whom the problem of death by Love is added to the multiple wars that have never ceased in the world since the so-called END of the last World War!
Above all, my ballets are encounters: with music, with life, with death, with love… with all those, whose life and works find a renewal within me. Moreover, the dancer who I am no longer is reincarnated each time by the dancers who surpass this former self.
A love affair with the music by Queen. Invention, violence, humour, love: it’s all there. I love the group. They inspire me and guide me, sometimes through this no man’s land where we will all go one day and where, I am sure, Freddie Mercury is playing a duet on the piano with Mozart.
A ballet about youth and hope, as hopeless and optimistic as they are. Despite everything, I believe that “the show must go on”, as Queen put it in one of their songs.“
– Maurice Béjart
