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Ballet for Life

Nearly thirty years since its world premiere, and society’s catching up to the complex diversity showcased in Maurice Béjart’s “Ballet for Life.” As a tribute to love in all its multifaceted manifestations—erotic desire, enduring friendship, artistic adulation, beyond the confines of society’s judgments and between either sex, inside and outside of marriage—the ballet long predicted our evolving understanding of sexuality and love.

Performance

Béjart Ballet Lausanne: “Ballet for Life” by Maurice Béjart

Place

Bunka Kaikan, Tokyo, Japan, September 21, 2024

Words

Kris Kosaka

Béjart Ballet Lausanne in “Ballet for Life” by Maurice Béjart. Photograph by Kiyonori Hasegawa | NBS

The underlying emotional truths within Béjart’s artistry are gorgeously complemented with costumes by Gianni Versace, minimalistic sets and lighting design (Clement Cayrol). The whole unfolds in a series of vignettes that emerge as separate but connected allegorical musings rather than a progressive narrative. Exactly what you’d expect from Béjart, the son of a French-Senegalese philosopher and one of the acknowledged giants of contemporary ballet. 

“Ballet for Life” was famously inspired by the deaths of Freddie Mercury, lead singer of the English band, Queen, and Jorge Donn, a soloist in Béjart’s company and longtime collaborator, on and off the stage. Both Mercury and Donn died at 45 years old within a year of each other, both from complications of AIDS. The ballet was first performed in 1996 by his company, Béjart Ballet Lausanne (BBL) at the Salle Métropole Theatre before debuting in Paris. Featuring the music of Queen and Mozart (who also died young, at 35 years old), the ballet was recently staged in Tokyo as the Company enjoys great popularity in Japan, honoring Béjart’s long relationship with Japanese culture and his many artistic collaborations here.

Béjart Ballet Lausanne in “Ballet for Life” by Maurice Béjart. Photograph by Kiyonori Hasegawa | NBS

Béjart Ballet Lausanne in “Ballet for Life” by Maurice Béjart. Photograph by Kiyonori Hasegawa | NBS

From the beginning, the audience was enraptured. The ballet opens with wind and thunder before the chords of Queen’s “It’s a Beautiful Day.” As the lights rise on a deceptively bare stage, dancers rise up from the floor, emerging from white, gauzy fabric evoking dawn, in an array of black and white, light and shadow that will become a recurring pattern throughout the performance. For this ballet on love is, of course, set in a time of death, the AIDS crisis. But any love exists within the shadow of physical or emotional death, and Béjart explores these ideas repeatedly throughout the work, at turns both farcical and serious, blithe and self-indulgent. 

Bejart’s choreography covers a similar spectrum of movement. It’s grotesque, playful, ridiculous, boisterous, elegant and staccato. Taken together, the choreography expresses the full span of this central human emotion. Dancers sprint, full-speed around the stage in the joyous exuberance of youthful love or passionate industry (costumed in mock business suits, suggesting love of work or success), while one dancer stays locked in a corner, jogging endlessly as if on a repetitive, narrow treadmill of obsessive pursuit (“A Kind of Magic”). The most purely fun sequence of the night, “Seaside Rendez-vous”,  perfectly conjures a light-hearted summer fling. In “Seaside,” the choreography, staging and colorful costumes so perfectly align with Queen’s rag-time, vaudevillian style, trite and delightful, familiar yet fresh, that it is hard to believe they weren’t created together. 

In another thought-provoking sequence, (“Get Down, Make Love”) unbridled sensuality is interrupted as Freddie (Julien Favreau) calls out in French, “You told us to make love, not war. We made love; why is love making war on us?” The music eases to Mozart’s Concerto 21 and embodiments of love and death perform a gorgeous pas de deux while hospital personnel wheel in dying lovers on gurneys. The gradual intersections and interactions of the dancers on stage is both poignant and life-affirming. The sequence ends with the two dying lovers, their inert, separated bodies dragged upstage to lie together as Freddie entwines their hands, allowing them to reach upwards in shadow and light. It’s an affecting portrayal simultaneously representing the horror of the time and love’s power, beyond death. 

Béjart Ballet Lausanne in “Ballet for Life” by Maurice Béjart. Photograph by Kiyonori Hasegawa | NBS

Béjart Ballet Lausanne in “Ballet for Life” by Maurice Béjart. Photograph by Kiyonori Hasegawa | NBS

Perhaps the most well-known piece, danced to Mozart’s “Musique Maconnique” transitioning into Queen’s “Radio Gaga” and featuring Oscar Eduardo Chacon, Hideo Kishimoto and “all the boys,” spotlights a series of bare-chested male dancers willingly entering a boxed-in platform. The thematic interpretations are endless, both in acknowledgement of and in defiance to society’s confining sexual norms, especially at a time in history when homosexuality was particularly targeted. It’s both insightful and campy, and with its obvious celebration of the male form, quintessentially Béjart. 

Even when his staging seems off-point to modern audiences, Béjart forces us to rethink our unconscious bias. A triumphant last sequence, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” segues immediately into a tribute to Jorge Donn (“I Want to Break Free”), where archived footage of Donn dancing is projected center stage as the company watches from the sides. It’s too long, especially for today’s shortened attention-spans, yet on reflection, it seems wholly deliberate. Why do open displays of love invariably invite cynicism and derision? What shame is there, in celebrating a love, in keeping that love alive, on-stage and in hearts? What could easily be dismissed becomes something profound. Béjart himself, in portraiture, shares the stage with his dancers after the last stirring sequence in black and white, “The Show Must Go On” ends, the dancers melting back under their gauzy white fabrics, mimicking the show’s opening to complete the cycle of life and dance. The joyful, numerous curtain calls also spoke of this kind of love, between art and its audience. After his 30 years with the company as a dancer, it was the last time for Favreau to dance the role of Freddie in Tokyo as he takes on full duties as artistic director. The audience didn’t want him to go. 

Béjart’s essence lies in his fierce intellect, a creator who forces audiences to both think and feel, to question and reconsider. Queen fans will thrill to the many Easter eggs to Mercury in costuming and posturing, but don’t expect any straightforward biography. This December, BBL will stage “Ballet for Life” at the Beaulieu Theater in Lausanne for the first time in ten years. European fans shouldn’t miss the opportunity to see for themselves Béjart’s astute musings on the vast spectrum of sexuality, on the different forms and expressions love can take, over a lifetime. 

Kris Kosaka

Kris Kosaka is a writer and educator based in Kamakura, Japan. A lifelong ballet fan and studio rat in her youth, she's been contributing to the Japan Times since 2009. She writes across culture, but especially in dance, opera and literature. 

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