Maurice Béjart

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Béjart, Maurice (orig. M. Berger;b Marseilles, 1 Jan. 1927). French dancer, choreographer, and ballet director. A controversial and influential figure of 20th-century ballet, he has turned his hand to everything from pure dance to text-driven theatrical spectacle and even works of scandalous explicitness. Born the son of the philosopher Gaston Berger, he studied dance in Marseilles, Paris (with Egorova), and London (with Volkova) and made his debut in 1945. From 1945 to 1947 he toured with Schwarz, Charrat, and Petit; in 1949-50 he performed with Mona Inglesby's International Ballet, where he spent most of his time dancing the Prince in Swan Lake. He was with the Cullberg Ballet and the Royal Swedish Ballet (1950-2). In 1953 he founded Les Ballets de l'Étoile (with the writer Jean Laurent), the precursor to the Ballet Théâtre de Paris de Maurice Béjart (1957). He choreographed several ballets for the fledgeling troupe, including Symphonie pour un homme seul (1955), which was notable for being the first ballet choreographed to musique concrète (recorded sounds not made with musical instruments). In 1957 he created Sonate à trois, set to Bartók and based on Sartre's play No Exit. In 1959 he choreographed the wildly successful Sacre du printemps for the Brussels Opera, using a specially assembled company. This formed the nucleus of the Ballet of the 20th Century, set up the following year with Béjart as director and based at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, the city's opera house. This company became one of the most popular and well-travelled troupes in the world, with its repertoire of Béjart ballets bringing new, and especially younger, audiences to dance. They were attracted by his flamboyant and ambitious ballets (like Les 4 Fils Aymon, 1961, and The Merry Widow, 1963), which although firmly based in the classical technique carried a very modern sensibility and a grandiose theatricality (deemed pompous and pretentious by his critics). He was also quick to pick up on the new: he was one of the first choreographers to use electronic music, for instance, and in the late 1960s he tapped into the prevailing hippie zeitgeist, adding mysticism and Eastern ideologies to his choreography (Bakhti, 1968, and Nijinsky, clown de Dieu, 1971, for example). He has also enjoyed a lifelong fascination with Wagner, taking part in Wieland Wagner's 1961 Bayreuth production of Tannhäuser, choreographing Venusberg (1963), Mathilde (1965), Baudelaire (1968), and Les Vainqueurs (1969) to Wagner scores, and capping it all with Ring um den Ring for the Berlin Opera Ballet in 1990. In 1970 he became head of the Mudra Centre in Brussels, an international training school for the performing arts.

In 1987, following a disagreement with the Monnaie management, Béjart left Brussels and moved his operation to Lausanne, where it changed its name to Béjart Ballet Lausanne. In 1992 he founded the École-Atelier Rudra Béjart Lausanne, similar to the Mudra Centre. In the 1990s he often collaborated with the French ballerina Sylvie Guillem. Although he created several works for the Paris Opera Ballet (Damnation of Faust, 1964, Renard, 1965, and Firebird, 1970), most of his choreography has been for his own company. A representative list of his other ballets includes Symphony for a Lonely Man (mus. Pierre Henry and P. Schaeffer, 1955), Promethée (mus. Maurice Ohana, 1956), Sonate à trois (mus. Bartók, 1957), Orphée (mus. Henry, 1958), Bolero (mus. Ravel, 1960), The Seven Deadly Sins (mus. Weill, 1961), Tales of Hoffmann (opera by Offenbach, 1961), Les 4 Fils Aymon (with Charrat; mus. 15th and 16th century, 1961), Les Noces (mus. Stravinsky, 1962), A la recherche de Don Juan (revised version, mus. 16th century, 1962), Suite viennoise (mus. Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, 1962), Ninth Symphony (mus. Beethoven, 1964), L'Oiseau de feu (second version; mus. Stravinsky, 1964), Romeo and Juliet (mus. Berlioz, 1966), Messe pour le temps present, or Mass for Our Time (1967), A la recherche de … (mus. various, 1968), Serait-ce la mort? (mus. R. Strauss, 1970), Song of a Wayfarer (mus. Mahler, 1971), Nijinsky, clown de Dieu (mus. Tchaikovsky and Pierre Henry, 1971), Stimmung (mus. Stockhausen, 1972), Golestan—Garden of Roses (1973), Le Marteau sans maître (mus. Boulez, 1973), La traviata (Verdi opera, 1973), Seraphite (mus. Mozart, 1974), I trionfi (mus. Berio, 1974), Notre Faust (mus. Bach, 1975), Le Molière imaginaire (mus. Rota, 1976), Les Illuminations (mus. Henry, oriental, 1979), Eros-Thanatos (mus. various, 1980), La Flute enchantée (mus. Mozart, 1981), Wien, Wien nur du allein (mus. Schoenberg, Beethoven, and others, 1982), Messe pour le temps futur (mus. Wagner, Beethoven, 1983), Cinq nô modernes (text Mishima, 1984), The Contest (mus. Le Bar and others, 1985), Malraux, ou, La Métamorphose des dieux (mus. Beethoven, Le Bars, traditional, 1986), Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien (mus. Debussy, 1986), Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (mus. Debussy, 1987), Piaf (mus. Piaf, 1988), 1789 … et nous (1989), Tod in Wien (mus. Mozart, 1991), Le Mandarin merveilleux (1992), Lear-Prospero (1994), Journal (1995), Mutation X (1998), The Nutcracker (1998), and Mother Teresa and the children of the world (2002). In 1997 in Lausanne he staged Ballet for Life, with music by Mozart and the rock group Queen and costumes by Versace; the work drew its inspiration from the lives of the singer Freddie Mercury and the dancer Jorge Donn, both of whom died of Aids. Author of Maurice Béjart: Un instant dans la vie d'autrui, Memoires (Paris, 1979), and Ballets par Béjart (Paris, 1979). He also wrote the novel Mathilde, ou le temps perdu (1963) and the plays La Reine verte (1963) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1967). Erasmus Prize (1974). Medal of the Order of the Rising Sun, Japan.