Ballet: Marie Antoinette - Premiere - Schedule, Program & Tickets
Ballet: Marie Antoinette - Premiere
Ballet by Thierry Malandain
"When she stands erect, she is the statue of beauty; when she moves, she is grace incarnate," wrote the English writer and artist Horace Walpole in the 18th century about the legendary queen of France: Marie Antoinette. For the French choreographer Thierry Malandain, this dazzling figure in French history was the inspiration for a ballet that premiered in 2019 with his ensemble, the Malandain Ballet Biarritz, at the very site that Marie Antoinette inaugurated on May 16, 1770, on the occasion of her wedding to Louis XVI: the Opéra Royal Château de Versailles.
Marie Antoinette's life in Versailles is also the focus of Malandain's ballet, which the choreographer created to the music of two of Antoinette's contemporaries – Joseph Haydn and Christoph Willibald Gluck. The piece depicts her arrival at court, the day of her wedding, the inauguration of the opera with Jean-Baptiste Lully's Persée – as a ballet within a ballet –, her attempted escape that ultimately proved her undoing, and the infamous parties and balls with which the queen is associated.
In his movement language, Malandain's individual neoclassicism also meets dance elements from another era. He unfolds baroque gestures while remaining true to a powerful and modern style. In his choreography, Malandain portrays a queen who not only reveled in splendor, excess, and vanity, but also spent her entire life as the plaything of others – her mother, her court, the French public – and who sank into loneliness and melancholy.
Her search for distraction and her penchant for entertainment become the means of expression of the ballet, which depicts Marie Antoinette in her greatest role, that of the Queen of France: "...but the star of misfortune was written on her forehead. For her, who loved the theater, the curtain fell on the delightful comedy with the sound of a steel blade," says Malandain.
Subject to change.
"When she stands erect, she is the statue of beauty; when she moves, she is grace incarnate," wrote the English writer and artist Horace Walpole in the 18th century about the legendary queen of France: Marie Antoinette. For the French choreographer Thierry Malandain, this dazzling figure in French history was the inspiration for a ballet that premiered in 2019 with his ensemble, the Malandain Ballet Biarritz, at the very site that Marie Antoinette inaugurated on May 16, 1770, on the occasion of her wedding to Louis XVI: the Opéra Royal Château de Versailles.
Marie Antoinette's life in Versailles is also the focus of Malandain's ballet, which the choreographer created to the music of two of Antoinette's contemporaries – Joseph Haydn and Christoph Willibald Gluck. The piece depicts her arrival at court, the day of her wedding, the inauguration of the opera with Jean-Baptiste Lully's Persée – as a ballet within a ballet –, her attempted escape that ultimately proved her undoing, and the infamous parties and balls with which the queen is associated.
In his movement language, Malandain's individual neoclassicism also meets dance elements from another era. He unfolds baroque gestures while remaining true to a powerful and modern style. In his choreography, Malandain portrays a queen who not only reveled in splendor, excess, and vanity, but also spent her entire life as the plaything of others – her mother, her court, the French public – and who sank into loneliness and melancholy.
Her search for distraction and her penchant for entertainment become the means of expression of the ballet, which depicts Marie Antoinette in her greatest role, that of the Queen of France: "...but the star of misfortune was written on her forehead. For her, who loved the theater, the curtain fell on the delightful comedy with the sound of a steel blade," says Malandain.
Subject to change.