Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui takes leave of Opera Ballet Vlaanderen with a grand gesture. His masterful Noetic stands on the bill alongside a milestone from dance history: Le Sacre du printemps by Pina Bausch. The connection between people is the link between the two gripping choreographies.
This summer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui leaves Opera Ballet Vlaanderen after six years as ballet artistic director. Although he has the rest of this season still planned, the house is taking this production as an opportunity to give him a proper farewell and thank him for the work he has done with the dancers of Opera Ballet Vlaanderen over the past years.
This production shows the result of that.
After London and Paris, Opera Ballet Vlaanderen is the only company in the world that receives permission from the Pina Bausch Foundation to dance Pina Bausch's Le Sacre du printemps. Earlier, the company already received unique permission to present Café Müller. This confidence in the level and achievements of our dancers is undoubtedly one of Cherkaoui's merits.
Le Sacre du printemps is a landmark in Bausch's oeuvre. In a square of peat, men and women dance a ritual of life and death to the mighty score by Igor Stravinsky. In 1975, this adaptation was as explosive as the original from 1913 and has lost nothing of its power today.
In Noetic, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui once again teams up with British visual artist Antony Gormley, with whom he has collaborated several times before. On the minimalist score by Szymon Brzóska, Noetic explores the instinctive human need to structure every detail of our existence, and our desire to break free from the rules and discover what lies beyond. Larbi wants to show the audience how we create structure for and towards each other. That interpersonal connection is central to the work.