When ballets reveal current events

“Rhapsody in blue” by Giorgio Madia, presented in Lausanne by the Béjart Ballet, presents, with a fantasy full of verve, an ensemble movement to music by Gershwin composed a hundred years ago, in 1924. Everything is not what fluidity in this setting of sparkling paintings. On stage, the variations stand out succinctly to dissolve in the collective gesture: dressed in sapphire blue, the dancers form a united and liquid mass, playing with their free bodies. Then, the enthusiasm, highlighted in the score, flows directly onto the spectators. The climax is literally reached when at the end of the ballet, a human wave hoists one of the protagonists to the top, a lamp in his hand turned towards the audience.

A celebration of ballet, a dance of dance: is this all the effort to surpass the guest choreographer, a former member of the troupe? Put in context, doesn’t the work say something else? Scheduled during the evening between a bloodthirsty “Hamlet” and a heroic “Bolero”, this brief entertainment can only provoke deeper, heavier questions, precisely because of its lively freshness. Is it permissible, in the current situation, in 2024, to dance like this? This seems to be the choreographer’s question, while ultimately projecting onto his audience the blind dazzle of the Roaring Twenties, of which Gershwin’s music remains an illustrious testimony.

This ballet thus enters into dialogue with Sharon Eyal’s “Strong”, danced at the same time by the troupe of the Grand Théâtre de Genève. At first glance, the contrast is striking. In the half-light, to the beats of electronic music, a group of dancers mechanically perform a series of jerky steps. Each gesture exudes murder in this arid and harsh atmosphere, haunted by pathetic figures, grotesquely exhibiting their muscles. It is therefore only by using an even more extreme vigor, bordering on disarticulation, that an individual exceptionally manages to extract himself from this fanatically dehumanized collective, welded together perhaps by some absurd belief.

Open wound

Obviously, the Israeli choreographer, who initially staged this ballet in Berlin, cannot but have wanted to call into question a totalitarian movement, of which the group of dancers are as much the executioners as the victims. Ballet about history, no doubt, but also a dance of existence, like the sign of a wound left open by what is left unsaid; it ends in extinction, which is death or scarring.

While “Rhapsody in Blue” mischievously questions the persistent blindness of an illusion, “Strong” brutally designates the current threat of herd blindness. If the first uses a mechanism of amplification, when the second indicts, these works ultimately employ a process of unveiling that relies, for both, on the cathartic force of art.

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