Imperial Ball began as an invitation to the city of Vienna, made to Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, choreographer and director of the Ballet Grand Théâtre de Genève, to commemorate the bicentenary of the birth of Johann Strauss II. Going beyond codes and genres, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui will question the very nature of balls and ballet, their common roots and their differences, in an exploration of dance whose social aspect conceals a political tool. For behind the music and the movement, tensions and conflicts are buried, attention is diverted from a nation’s problems, and anything that disturbs is smoothed over. Whether it’s a waltz or a military march, a dance or parade, the staging and charm of the manipulation override reality.

Familiar with the choreographer’s creative universe, two Japanese will confront the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and its performances of Viennese waltzes and dances: Tsubasa Hori, a taiko and contemporary music percussionist, and Shogo Yoshii, a musician who travelled the Japanese countryside to study folk music before joining the Kodō percussion group and has already taken part in the Noetic and Ukiyo-e productions at the Grand Théâtre de Genève.

Designing the costumes and set will be talented artist Tim Yip, known especially for his work as a set designer on films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but also his diverse collaborations, from Bob Wilson to Akram Khan and Franco Dragone. Together, they will reenact this cultural confrontation between East and West, past and present, in which Cherkaoui will develop a fluid, violent, yet also sensitive dance versus the waltz, the musical face of the imperialist Europe of today and of yore.

As its counterpart, in the second half of the evening, the OSR and the Ballet will present the Boléro choreography by Franco-Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet, associate artist of the Grand Théâtre de Genève, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and artist Marina Abramović which they created in 2013 for the Opéra de Paris, before being reunited again in 2016 to create the Pelléas and Mélisande featured in the Grand Théâtre’s opera season. To the gigantic crescendo of this other three- time dance made global by Ravel, black-clad dancers spin

and tumble down, doubled by way of a giant mirror set behind them. Black capes fall as they engage in a tantric, viscerally powerful dance of death, to which only death is capable of bringing the final blow of dissolution into nothingness, perfect joy and total consummation.