“Boléro,” set to Maurice Ravel’s famous masterpiece, is another creation rooted in the legacy of the Ballets Russes, originally commissioned from the composer by Ida Rubinstein and premiered in Paris in 1928 with choreography by Bronislava Nijinska. In 2001, Malandain created his own version of a score that has inspired countless reinterpretations. Twelve dancers in flesh-coloured overalls are confined within a space of semi-transparent panels designed by Gallardo, translating the score’s stubborn, hammering repetition into a kind of cage. The choreography relies on modular compositions, extensive floorwork, and shifts between instinctive bursts and the search for distilled geometry. There are moments of fatigue and freedom, approaches, interactions and separations, yet the dancers remain within a rational spatial order. The piece gradually conveys the raw sexual energy of the music as it builds towards physical exhaustion, until the dancers finally break free from their enclosed space. Yet the monotony of certain passages, followed by the ease with which they escape, makes both the struggle and the final liberation feel slightly unconvincing.

The culmination of the evening is “Minuit et demi, ou le Cœur mystérieux,” a 2025 creation that offers an abstract, evocative composition set to the music of Camille Saint-Saëns. Driven by fluid floorwork, upside-down poses with legs reaching into the air, intertwined arms and symmetrical shapes, the piece is a dreamlike homage to the French imagination, both in its musical choices and its aesthetic sensibility, touching on universal lyrical themes such as the passage of time, human desire and the finitude of life. The visual elegance is enhanced by the costumes, first long, flowing blue cloaks, then pale blue attire, finally beige overalls. It alternates solos, pas de deux, small groups and choral scenes. The duets are poetic, enriched by subtle shifts out of balance and athletic passages. Ensemble circles harness centrifugal force as dancers sequentially detach and fall away. Overall, the piece is delicate and linear, blending neoclassical precision with intimate expressiveness. It feels soothing, evoking a group of young friends running and playing on the beach in Biarritz on a September afternoon, making it a fitting farewell for Malandain.

A melancholic sense of sunset had been there throughout the evening, perhaps suggesting something more than a passing of the baton: the possibility that this taste for comforting, conservative modernism, atavistic beauty and reassuring innocuousness may no longer feel quite as vital within a dance landscape that is rapidly evolving. The new agreement signed in Paris in September 2026 between the Basque Government and the CCN, bringing Euskadi into the structure as a public partner for 2027–2030, reinforces Biarritz’s role as a choreographic hub and gives the institution an important degree of continuity as it enters its next chapter. The hope is that the identity Malandain Ballet Biarritz has built over the years, and the heritage it carries, will not be lost, but will nourish a new aesthetic identity capable of carrying the company far into the future.