'Ma Bayadère', the new creation of Jean-Christophe Maillot

'Not only dance but dance at the service of the human and its history'. This is the proverbial cornerstone of the creations of Jean-Christophe Maillot, the man who has been at the helm of the Ballets de Monte-Carlo for over thirty years and who today adds a new chapter to the Monegasque company's rich repertoire with his 'Bayadère'. A creation that takes its cue from the well-known 19th-century ballet by Léon Minkus, retaining some of its primitive plot outlines but completely remodelling its identity.

With "Ma Bayadère", in fact, Jean-Christophe Maillot reveals his intention to show a hypothetical ballet company engaged in the rehearsals of the very traditional version of the ballet of 1877, delivering, at the same time, the authentic daily life of the dancers, choreographer and maître de ballet, alternating rivalries, turbulent loves, jealousies, dance classes, dramas and the pleasure of sharing an art that imposes a pervasive dedication. With such premises, the work presented in its world premiere at the Grimaldi Forum offers the opportunity to appreciate a solid creation, dramaturgically convincing, with a linear line and perfectly ascribable to the choreographic aesthetics proper to the company director.

A work that can be counted in the repertoire of narrative dance anchored in the inescapable classical-academic vocabulary, but constantly in dialogue with that lightness and dynamic that allows the dancer to 'inhabit movement' - as Maillot often repeats - with ease and awareness.

Thus the young dancer Niki, here entrusted to Juliette Klein, is a talented artist who, in the variation of the fifth scene of the first act, draws a solo at the barre skilfully imbued with charm and sensuality before facing, in the tenth scene, the rival Gamza - étoile of the company - in the convincing interpretation of Romina Contreras.

Completing the cornerstones of the creation are Michele Esposito as the maître de ballet Brahma, the dashing Ige Cornelis in the charming role of the 'étoile' Solo, as well as the male dancers who portray energy and effective expressive force. Four characters that we will also remember for the solid choreographic and scenographic architecture of the final moments of the first act with the incisive expedient of the theatre within the theatre and the consequent metamorphosis in the second act. Here, an "artificial paradise" vigorously conceived by Jérôme Kaplan - the designer of sets and costumes - is the moment when rivalry gives way to harmony and the sharing of a common dream: the ineffable yearning for dance.