Special Programme – 20th Anniversary of L’Esplanade du Lac, curated by Julien Favreau

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of L’Esplanade du Lac, the Béjart Ballet Lausanne returns to the stage of Divonne-les-Bains for an exceptional evening of celebration. Guided by the vision of Artistic Director Julien Favreau, the company revisits the legacy of Maurice Béjart with both boldness and refinement, bringing together emblematic works and distinctive choreographic choices.

The evening opens with one of Maurice Béjart’s most intimate solos, La Luna. Created in 1984 for the great Italian dancer Luciana Savignano to music by Bach, this iconic piece was later performed worldwide by étoile Sylvie Guillem. In just a few minutes, La Luna distills the very essence of Maurice Béjart’s choreographic universe and his writing of gesture. Through a movement vocabulary of extreme delicacy, motion born from the chest unfolds into space, offering a moment of pure introspection — at once fragile and profoundly luminous.

The programme continues with Variations pour une porte et soupir, a fascinating work in which, as Maurice Béjart himself describes: “Seven dancers enter the stage to create a ballet in which the choreographer has no place. Seven dancers will improvise freely. Only a pre-established structure defines their relationships and assigns them the variations they must dance. This structure, conceived abstractly for seven numbers, offers 49 possible combinations, since each evening chance assigns different numbers to the dancers, thus eliminating any risk of repetition.”

To close the evening, the company will present Béjart autour du Monde for the very first time — a tribute by Julien Favreau to the traveling, humanist spirit of Maurice Béjart. Through a succession of pas de deux and solos drawn from the master’s major works, Favreau composes a sensitive itinerary, a poetic journey across continents and emotions — a celebration of the universality of gesture and of the beauty of the world as seen through Béjart’s eyes.

*Beware of the grey ticketing market: Béjart Ballet Lausanne cannot be held responsible for any purchase of show tickets outside the official ticket offices mentioned on the website.