Objects of Desire

Maurice Béjart would surely have been delighted to see La Seine Musicale’s vast Grande Salle, that striking structure seemingly floating on the river above the Île Seguin, filled for all six March performances of his company’s tour. At the heart of his vision was the desire to open dance to the widest possible public, across geographical and cultural boundaries: to take it beyond logistical and ideological limits, and even beyond dance itself, transforming it into a form of total theatre. Hence the grand scale of his creations, conceived to bring ballet beyond the opera house and its traditionally exclusive audience, and to give it instead the immediacy and reach of cinema or rock concerts, from the Palais des Sports in Paris to Forest National in Brussels.

Performance

Béjart Ballet Lausanne

Place

La Seine Musicale, Paris, France, March 12, 2026

Words

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Béjart Ballet Lausanne in “Boléro” by Maurice Béjart. Photograph by Laurent Philippe

The programme devised for this tour, a prelude to the 2027 season marking both the centenary of Béjart’s birth and the fortieth anniversary of his company in Lausanne, opens with “Béjart et nous,” a medley by Julien Favreau: a florilegium of moments masterfully drawn from Béjart’s creative world, offering an expressive and intelligently shaped introduction to the choreographer’s language. Artistic director of the company since 2024 and himself a former leading interpreter of the repertoire, Favreau frames the programme as a living reactivation of Béjart’s legacy. It begins with a burst of solar energy in Stravinsky’s “Concerto en ré,” unfolding in iconic bright yellow costumes with immediate, vital clarity. This gives way to “Héliogabale,” a far more impulsive and earthy fragment, shaped by Béjart’s fascination with ritual and the expressive force of the body, and set to the rhythmic drive of traditional music from Chad. In “Chambre séparée,” the atmosphere becomes more rarefied. This pas de deux, drawn from “Wien, Wien, nur du Allein,” offers a poised and tender interlude; Solène Burel and Josué Ullate appear as two pale blue silhouettes, tracing crystalline balances with exquisite musicality. By contrast, the solo “Trish Trash,” superbly delivered by Daniel Aguado Ramsay, playfully unsettles the classical idiom through athletic wit, sudden bursts of exuberance, and a final flourish of turns that draws the audience into delighted applause.

Among the other excerpts, “Le Tango de Faust” was one of the evening’s most fully realised moments. It shifted the programme’s emotional temperature, becoming at once more erotic, more intimate and more highly charged, and was compellingly danced by Aubin Le Marchand and Antoine Le Moal. The duet also gave striking form to Béjart’s enduring interest in the expressive potential of the male body, and in the singular dramatic and physical presence male dancers can bring to the stage. From there, the programme opened onto the sea-swept world of the celebrated “Seven Greek Dances.” Set to Mikis Theodorakis’s score, the piece unfolds in a vigorous movement language marked by folk inflections and archaic resonances, bringing a surge of open air vitality to the stage, before the Jewish dance from “Dibouk” burst through with thrilling speed and whiplash chaîné turns. One of the programme’s most affecting passages came with excerpts from the ballets devoted to Jacques Brel and Barbara, tributes not only to two legendary chansonniers, but also to the deeply personal Belgian world of memory, friendship and feeling that runs through Béjart’s life and work. In “Ne me quitte pas,” Elisabet Ros, its original interpreter, performed barefoot with exceptional intensity and rare dramatic concentration. The finale, “Le Jerk” from “Messe pour le temps présent,” returned to Béjart’s collaboration with Pierre Henry, a pioneer of electroacoustic music. Danced by an ensemble in jeans and trainers, it remains a vivid testament to Béjart’s openness to popular culture, and to his gift for channelling its energies into eclectic, unforgettable forms that themselves became part of cultural memory.

Béjart Ballet Lausanne in “Béjart et nous.” Photograph by Laurent Philippe

The second half of the programme was devoted to two keystones of Béjart’s creative world: “The Firebird” and “Boléro.” Created in 1970 for the Paris Opera Ballet, Béjart’s “The Firebird” already reveals his desire to strip myth of decorative narrative. Drawing on Stravinsky’s 1945 suite, shorter and more concise than the original 1910 score, he reimagined the work not as a fairytale but as a revolutionary allegory, more forceful and charged with social urgency. Here Béjart’s greatness becomes fully apparent. Even when he claims to attend only to the work itself, he remains deeply attuned to the forces moving behind it, to the energies that give the choreography its density and resonance. That intuition, as he recalls in his memoirs Un instant dans la vie d’autrui (1979, pp. 69–70), was sharpened by his reading of Russian revolutionary poets including Blok, Yesenin, Mayakovsky and Pasternak. Konosuke Takeoka was superb in the title role, at once sensitive and luminously vulnerable, while Zsolt Kovács, as the Phoenix, projected a triumphant vigour.

Finally came “Boléro,” perhaps the most emblematic work of all. Béjart was drawn less to the Spain suggested by the title than to the Orient he sensed within Ravel’s score. What captivated him was the melody itself, insinuating and serpentine, embodied by the soloist on the huge round red table, carried to the centre of the stage by black-clad stagehands to the martial sound of a drum, as though in the course of a solemn rite. The rhythm belongs instead to the whole ensemble, first seated on chairs, then gathering around the table, absorbing and relaying the soloist’s energy in a collective rite. In Béjart’s hands, Boléro becomes, as he wrote in his memoirs (1979, p. 151), “une histoire de désir.” Whether the central role is danced by a man or a woman, this is the drama enacted before us, and Elisabet Ros conveyed it with remarkable force, while also carrying the melancholy of an approaching farewell to the role.

Béjart Ballet Lausanne in “The Firebird” by Maurice Béjart. Photograph by Laurent Philippe

Béjart’s ballet speaks to us from a time that no longer quite exists. His life traversed, and was deeply marked by, the twentieth century: a journey through France, Belgium and Switzerland, but also an intellectual and spiritual passage through philosophies, rituals and traditions far beyond Europe. The son of the philosopher Gaston Berger and the artist Germaine Capellières, whose early death left a void he would spend a lifetime trying to fill through dance, Béjart bequeathed to us a legacy of immense and generous curiosity, sustained by a genuine thirst for knowledge and a tireless desire to read, study and explore. It is a legacy that deserves to remain a shared inheritance for artists and creators today.

There are, moreover, reasons why, even if he speaks to us from another epoch, watching Béjart can still feel like a breath of fresh air. We have become so accustomed to the theatre’s star system that it is genuinely refreshing to encounter a company shaped less by hierarchy than by the circulation of energy, where the group matters as much as the individual, and where force passes from body to body. The programme also reminds us of Béjart’s extraordinary gift for forging creative alliances with other major artists, and of his ability, through these encounters, to produce works that have entered our collective memory. In this sense, Béjart became part of our cultural imagination. His work remains timeless because it makes performance at once theatre and ritual, and because the contingent and the metaphysical converge in a shared search for beauty, that long forgotten object of desire too often set aside in contemporary dance.

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti is a Paris-based philosopher researching ancient thought, divination, and practices of salvation at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. With over a decade of ballet training, she studied History of Dance as part of her Philosophy and Aesthetics degree at the University of Bologna. Alongside her academic work, she writes about dance.

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