With the support of
The artistic collaboration and deep friendship between Maurice Béjart and Pierre Henry, who is also known for inventing concrete music with Pierre Schaeffer, have made history. Symphonie pour un Homme seul is the founding work of the Béjartian style, and will be performed by the BBL to complete this new programme.
“What is time in a work on magnetic tape ?” asked Pierre Henry in his diary Journal de Mes Sons (1979). It is a rhythmic quality imposed by rigid durations. What I means is, through live, naturally textured, intersecting sounds, arranged according to our will, we create an artificial tempo. This rhythm, I wouldn’t say that we write it so much as we devise it. We play it. And to play it, we perform emotional gestures, jerky, linear, strong, weak : the very gestures that Béjart invented for dance”. The encounter is a physical one. It speaks to the mind as much as the body as long as it is approached without prejudice, with eyes and ears wide open. What is the link that connects the dancer of today, surrounded by contemporary rhythms, to this music which overturned the cultural landscape and influenced all subsequent artistic trends ?
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Improvisation
Based on the dramatic structure conceived by Maurice Béjart for Variations pour une porte et un soupir Premiere Opéra de Lausanne, November 27, 2020
At the opening of the evening, the BBL finds resonance by drawing on the dramatic structure of the ballet Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir, created in Brussels in 1965 to the music of Pierre Henry. Although here, the score is entrusted to the group Citypercussion. The original version is present in the form of echos and integrated sound effects, mixed into the sixteen new compositions. Seven dancers enter the stage. The choreographer is absent. The title of each of sixteen pieces is written on a huge blackboard : Sleep, Gymnastics, Nothing… each title has number that the artists must draw at random and interpret freely in improvisation, as a solo, a duet, or in any combination.
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La porte
Première Brooklyn Academy, New-York, 1970
The second part of the programme is also exploratory, but this time it’s an exploration of form. In 1970, for the launch of the Brooklyn Academy season in New York, Maurice Béjart caused a sensation by presenting La Porte, a solo en pointe set for Maïna Gielgud to the music of four of the Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir. Here, Gil Roman poses questions about identity by entrusting the role to another dancer for the first time.
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Symphony for a single man
Premiere at the Théâtre de l’Étoile, Paris, July 26, 1955
The evenings ends with a beginning, with Symphonie pour un Homme Seul, performed now, sixteen years since its last performance at the Théâtre Métropole in Lausanne. The piece was created in Paris in front of a sparse audience on the 26th of July 1955, and at that time, it unveiled a choreographer whose unique personality and talent would revolutionise the art of ballet. Born from an impromptu meeting between the choreographer and two Pierres, this is the definitive early work of a young choreographer that displays the breadth of his aspirations. It is the unusual piece that introduces him to the world.
If the chronicle reports that the first one held only the attention of the ushers, of some curious people and of… Serge Lifar, who remained in the capital despite the scorching summer, this meditation on modern solitude presented on a bare stage, the anxious wandering of a man in a city universe teeming with an anonymous and hostile crowd, announces the tipping point (and the torments) of contemporary society. And suggests the imperative need to rise to survive…
Many times danced since its creation, Symphony for a Single Man still fascinates and upsets the audience. “Let the modern dancer, without costume or decor, be without drums or trumpets, wrote Pierre Schaeffer at the time. To the rhythm of his own heart, if he is sincere, his dance will be truer”…
Jean Ellgass
Executive director of the Béjart Ballet Lausanne
Photo © BBL – Marc Ducrest
Pierre Henry was born on the 9th of December 1927 in Paris and studied music from the age of 7. In 1944, guided by Olivier Messiaen, he composed and considered the music of the future. His meeting with Pierre Schaeffer played a decisive role in developing his work. Schaeffer’s work has always been extraordinarily inspired and ambitious, and his wide and varied body of work continues to excite new audiences. Henry invented technical methods of composition that are now recognised as standard. He created a musical universe of cosmic magnitude, and a sound as recognisable and personal as those of the most famous jazz musicians. He created a world where the archaic and the mythical rub shoulders with the familiar, an alternative reality that mirrors the wonders, hopes, and fears of our time.
For nearly thirty years, the dancer performed Maurice Béjart’s most famous ballets before creating and succeeding him. Trained by Marika Besobrasova, Rosella Hightower and José Ferran, Gil Roman joined Maurice Béjart’s Ballet du XXe Siècle in 1979. For almost thirty years, he performed the choreographer’s most famous ballets. In 2007, Maurice Béjart appointed him as his successor at the head of the Béjart Ballet Lausanne.
Since 1995, his choreographic career has been rich in creations: L’habit ne fait pas le moine, Réflexion sur Béla, Échographie d’une baleine, Casino des Esprits, Aria, Syncope, Là où sont les oiseaux (world premiere at the China Shanghai International Arts Festival in 2011) and Anima blues. Since this last work in 2013, six new works have been added to the repertoire: 3 Dances for Tony, Kyôdaï, Tombées de la dernière pluie, Impromptu…, t ‘M et variations…, presented on 16 December 2016, to inaugurate the year 2017, marking the 30th anniversary of the BBL and the 10th anniversary of Maurice Béjart’s death. In April 2019 at the Opéra de Lausanne, he presents his latest creation Tous les hommes presque toujours s’imagine entirely choreographed to the music of John Zorn.
Gil Roman’s career represents more than forty years of uninterrupted dance. It was crowned in 2005 by the Danza & Danza Award for best dancer for his interpretation of Jacques Brel in the ballet Brel et Barbara, and in 2006 by the prestigious Nijinsky Award given by the Monaco Dance Forum.
In 2014, the Fondation vaudoise pour la culture awarded him its Prix du rayonnement. In November of the same year, during the Asian tour of The Ninth Symphony, he was awarded the Special Prize of the Shanghai Arts Festival. The following year, at the KKL in Lucerne, he was awarded the Maya Plisetskaya 2015 Prize at an evening tribute to the great dancer who died that year. His Excellency Mr. René Roudaut, Ambassador of France in Switzerland, awarded him, on Friday 29 May 2015 in Lausanne, the insignia of Knight in the National Order of Merit, one of the most prestigious French decorations. Four years later, the Council of State of the Canton of Vaud awarded him the Mérite cantonal for his “remarkable contribution to choreography and dance”.
From the Ballets de l’Étoile in Paris in 1955 to the creation of Béjart Ballet Lausanne in 1987, choreography has made a permanent mark on the world of dance.
Maurice Béjart was born 1 January 1927 in Marseille. He began his career as a dancer in Vichy in 1946, continuing with Janine Charrat, Roland Petit and in particular in London, with the International Ballet. It was while on tour in Sweden with Ballet Cullberg (1949) that he discovered methods of choreographic expression. A contract for a Swedish film brought him face to face for the first time with Stravinsky, but on returning to Paris, he started off with Chopin’s pieces under the auspices of the critic Jean Laurent. The dancer thus doubled as a choreographer. In 1955 with the Ballets de l’Étoile, he goes off the beaten track with Symphonie pour un homme seul. Noticed by Maurice Huisman, the new director of La Monnaie, four years later he accomplished a triumphant Sacre du Printemps. The following year in Brussels, he created the Ballet du XXe Siècle, an international company which he led and which travelled the world, while the list of his creations continued to grow: Boléro, Messe pour le temps présent and L’Oiseau de Feu. In 1987, le Ballet du XXe Siècle moved to the Olympic capital and became the Béjart Ballet Lausanne (BBL). In 1992, Maurice Béjart decided to reduce the size of his company to around thirty dancers to “regain the essence of interpretation” and in the same year founded the École-Atelier Rudra Béjart Lausanne. The BBL’s many creations include the ballets Le Mandarin merveilleux, King Lear – Prospero, À propos de Shéhérazade, Lumière, MutationX, La Route de la soie, Le Manteau, Enfant-Roi, La Lumière des eaux and Le Presbytère n’a rien perdu de son charme, ni le jardin de son éclat. Maurice Béjart was a theatre director (La Reine verte, Casta Diva, Cinq Nô modernes, A-6-Roc), an opera director (Salome, La Traviata and Don Giovanni), and a film director (Bhakti, Paradoxe sur le comédien…), as well as a published author (novel, memoir, diary and play). In 2007, just before he turned 80, he premiered La vie du danseur racontée par Zig et Puce. Maurice Béjart died 22 November 2007 in Lausanne while working on his final piece, Le Tour du monde en 80 minutes.
Pierre Henry was born on the 9th of December 1927 in Paris and studied music from the age of 7. In 1944, guided by Olivier Messiaen, he composed and considered the music of the future. His meeting with Pierre Schaeffer played a decisive role in developing his work. Schaeffer’s work has always been extraordinarily inspired and ambitious, and his wide and varied body of work continues to excite new audiences. Henry invented technical methods of composition that are now recognised as standard. He created a musical universe of cosmic magnitude, and a sound as recognisable and personal as those of the most famous jazz musicians. He created a world where the archaic and the mythical rub shoulders with the familiar, an alternative reality that mirrors the wonders, hopes, and fears of our time.