Bella Figura

With Voluntaries, Glen Tetley creates a ballet that is both a spiritual journey and a physical odyssey. Premiered in 1973 for Stuttgart Ballet, the piece is a poignant tribute to John Cranko, who had passed away the year before. It embodies Tetley’s choreographic and intellectual complexity while offering a raw exploration of grief and transcendence.

From the opening moments, the ballet imposes its atmosphere: a weighty silence, an absence that reverberates. Then, with a jarring crash, the first chord of Poulenc’s Concerto in G Minor for Organ, Strings, and Timpani pierces the space. A figure emerges from the shadows, body straining toward the light, arms tracing vast circles as if grasping for the unreachable. Poulenc’s music, composed during a period when he moved away from youthful exuberance toward a near-sacred gravity, unfolds in waves—by turns crushing and ethereal. In moments, an almost carnivalesque lightness surfaces, echoes of the Parisian theaters of the 1920s and 30s.

Tetley fuses classical and modern dance with rare virtuosity. Voluntaries demands an ardent physicality, pushing dancers to their limits. They must merge the ethereal elevation of ballet with the visceral grounding of contemporary movement. Motion emerges from deep within the body, surging forth with urgency while maintaining an appearance of spontaneity. A recurring motif structures the choreography: a living cross, arms outstretched, head thrown back—an evocative image of the Crucifixion. This serves as a pivot between two states of being: soaring leaps where dancers defy gravity, propelled by thunderous timpani and organ swells, and introspective moments magnified by the orchestra’s lyrical passages.

Voluntaries is a work of liberation and ascension. In music, a "voluntary" is an organ improvisation, often played in religious services. The word’s Latin root suggests both flight and desire. This dual meaning deeply resonates in Tetley’s piece, where dance becomes a ritual of rebirth—a testament to the human spirit’s resilience in the face of loss.

Transcending the boundaries of dance, Tetley turns Voluntaries into an experience as much as a performance. For dancers, it is an initiation, a physical and emotional trial. For the audience, it is a meditation on memory, mourning, and the life force that compels the body to rise and leap—again and again—toward the light.

Choreography: Glen Tetley © Glen Tetley Legacy
Music: Francis Poulenc
Sets: Ivan Cavallari, Benoit Archambault
Costumes: Ivan Cavallari
Lighting: Marc Parent

Fête sauvage by Hélène Blackburn shakes us with raw, primal energy. Set to contemporary rhythms, Hélène Blackburn’s precise choreography unfolds through a series of solos and duos—moments of pleasure and spontaneous encounters. The piece invites us to recognize the wild heart that beats within us and transcends conventions.

Choreography: Hélène Blackburn
Music: Martin Tétreault
Sets and Costumes: Hélène Blackburn
Lighting: Marc Parent

The basic idea, as well as all the building material, with which Bella Figura was made, is not very complicated, but, maybe not so simple either, whenever viewed through the perspective of our experience. It is a “parable” on the relativity of sensuality, beauty and aesthetics in general, and on the question, how we face the phenomenon in our everyday life. It is a journey through time and space, illuminating our dignity, as well as our doubt. Finding beauty in a grimace - in a knot of the mind - or in a physical contortion. It is like trying to perform a balancing act on the string of your umbilical cord.

For the dancers, it is not only a manifestation of their competence, aesthetic qualities or technical accomplishment, but equally, it represents their acceptance of their deficiencies, doubts and vulnerability.

The words “Bella Figura” in Italian don’t only stand for “beautiful body”, they also represent a philosophical resilience of people facing a difficult situation - consequently it also means "putting on a brave face"...

With other words: The people in the audience will not know, whether the actor who is performing for them tonight, is in a difficult situation or not, they will not know anything about his personal problems, but the actor also knows, that they don’t know! All he knows is, that they bought tickets to see him, and that they want to be “entertained”. So he puts on his Bella Figura.

For a long time, I have asked myself the questions: “What is a performance, and who are actually the performers?”
And.... “When does the performance actually begin? Does it begin when the curtain raises, or at the moment of our birth - or does it all only start when the choreographer asks the dancers to learn their first steps?
Does the performance start when the dancers start putting on their make-up?" And...” Does the show finish whenever they leave the stage, or does it carry on until the end of our lives?” Or....” What is the difference between the clothes, we wear in the street, and the stage costume? Where lies the border between art and artificiality, and where should we draw the line between fantasy and reality?”
And finally: “Where is the border between the truth and a lie...?”
In any case - all these things, which I have just tried to describe to you, can be explained in a much easier way:
Imagine that you had a dream, in which you fell out of your bed, and as you wake up next morning, you realize, that you have a broken rib.
-Jiří Kylián - The Hague, September 23, 2007

Choreography: Jiří Kylián
Music: Lukas Foss, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Alessandro Marcello, Antonio Vivaldi, Giuseppe Torelli
Sets: Jiří Kylián
Costumes: Joke Visser
Lighting: Kees Tjebbes