BALLET EVENING

 

BALLET EVENING

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PETITE MORT

One-act ballet to music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

World premiere: 23 August 1991, Salzburg Festival,

NDT Company (Nederlands Dans Theater)

Premiere at the Astana Opera House:

13-14 May 2023

ARTISTIC AND PRODUCTION TEAM

Production Concept / Set Design / Choreography: Jiří Kylián

Assistant to the Choreographer: Stefan Zeromski

Music Director and Conductor: Elmar Buribayev

Costume Design: Joke Visser

Light Design: Jiří Kylián

Light Design Realization: Joop Caboort

Technical Supervisor Light/Set: Joost Biegelaar

Technical Project Manager: Victor Carare

Piano: Dolores Umbetaliyeva, Honoured Worker of Kazakhstan

Director, Host of the Performance: Elmira Sultangazina

Artistic Director of the Astana Opera Ballet Company: Altynai Asylmuratova, People’s Artist of Russia

The ballet Petite Mort was created to music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (the slow movements of two piano concertos) for the Salzburg Festival on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s death in 1991.

The title Petite Mort is profound and metaphorical. “La petite mort” (“the little death”) is what the French call the culmination of carnal pleasures, but Kylián is fascinated by the diversity of lovemaking, from innocent touches to passionate entanglements of bodies.

The six adagios arising from the meditative mass compositions are a masterpiece of amazing interpenetration of a magnificent musical basis and filigree movements. The bodies are obedient to the touch of the partners and the breath of the music, the love duels are drawn by an intricate graphic of lines.

Here love and death go hand in hand. The ballet is performed by six men and six women. In the hands of the male dancers there are either sharp rapiers or naked female bodies. The duets in Petite Mort are filled with sensuality, but Jiří Kylián does not at all emphasise the theme of carnal love; on the contrary, the divine harmony of his choreography leads to the fact that the duets suddenly lose all corporal sexuality and the eroticism loses its unambiguousness. It is not by chance that Kylián’s ballet has been called “a love lyric of the highest standard”.

 Tickets purchased at the Astana Opera are exchangeable and refundable only in cases of cancelled or postponed performances. In all other cases, no refunds and exchanges are possible.