PARIS OPERA BALLET Orphée et Eurydice: Pina Bausch

2012-01-17

From 04 to 16 February (19 h 30)
Phone: Tél. : 0892-89-90-90.
Price : From 7 € to 160 €.
About the event 'Orphée et Eurydice: Pina Bausch'
"Orphée et Eurydice" is one of Pina Bausch’s major works. The choreographer brings flesh and blood to Gluck’s score – here conducted by Thomas Hengelbrock—while opting to distance herself from the work’s happy ending.

Part of the national ballet repertoire of the Paris Opera in 2005, Orpheus and Eurydice is an opera whose score was created by the German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck and which was staged from 1975 by the German choreographer Pina Bausch (deceased in 2009). The latter had chosen to improve the work by extending the happy ending to focus on the despair and mourning experienced by Orpheus, who is powerless to bring his love, Eurydice, back to life.
Having descended into the Underworld to look for his loved-one, Orpheus fails to bring Eurydice back from the realm of the dead and watches her disappear forever. Beyond the mythological tale itself, the ballet evokes despair, grief and the fragility of the human condition. In this opera-dansé, first performed in Wuppertal in 1975 and added to the repertoire of the Paris Opera Ballet in 2005, each of the main roles is split in two, creating a permanent dialogue between song and dance.
This interpretation of Gluck’s work is directed by the famous German conductor, Thomas Hengelbrock and highlights the fragility of the human condition by emphasizing the dialogue between dancing and singing. The main characters are dual and perform on stage in a simple production that creates a strikingly beautiful show.

In this uncluttered staging, slender swanlike silhouettes trace images of disturbing beauty and plunge into painful introspection.

Christoph Willibald Gluck,    Music
Pina Bausch,    Choreography and staging
Rolf Borzik,    Sets, costumes and lighting
Etoiles, Premiers Danseurs and Corps de Ballet
Balthasar-Neumann Ensemble & Chor
Thomas Hengelbrock     (6, 15, 16 feb.) Conductor
Manlio Benzi    (4, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14 feb.) Conductor

Maria Riccarda Wesseling, Orphée
Yun Jung Choi, Eurydice
Zoe Nicolaidou, L’Amour