Maurice Béjart

Maurice Béjart, born in 1927 in Marseille, began his career as a dancer in 1946 in Vichy and continued it with Janine Charrat, Roland Petit, and above all with the International Ballet London. During a tour of Sweden with the Cullberg Ballet (1949), he discovered choreography for himself.

Together with the writer Jean Laurent, he founded Les Ballets de l’Étoile in Paris in the mid-1950s, from which the Ballet Théâtre de Paris emerged in 1957, with Béjart at the center of both companies – as artistic director, choreographer, and leading soloist all in one. With Symphonie pour un homme seul, created in 1955, he broke new ground: not only was his treatment of the theme of the solitary human being on the ballet stage innovative, but also his work with musique concrète by Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer.

Four years later, commissioned by Maurice Huisman, the new director of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Béjart created Le Sacre du Printemps, which became his first great triumph. A year later, he founded the Ballet du XXe Siècle in Brussels, with which he soon toured the world and for which he created a large number of works, including Boléro, Messe pour le temps, and L’Oiseau de Feu. In Brussels, he also created Le chant du compagnon errant in 1971 – choreographed for the two outstanding dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Paolo Bortoluzzi.

In 1987, Béjart relocated with his ensemble – since then known as Béjart Ballet Lausanne – to Lake Geneva. In 1992, he decided to reduce the size of the company to around 30 dancers in order to work more closely with selected performers and delve more deeply into the “essence” of his art. In the same year, he founded the École-Atelier Rudra Béjart Lausanne, and ten years later the Compagnie M for young dancers.

Among the many ballets created for Béjart Ballet Lausanne are Le Mandarin merveilleux, King Lear – Prospero, À propos de Shéhérazade, Lumière, Mutation X, La Route de la soie, Le Manteau, Enfant-Roi, La Lumière des eaux, and Le Presbytère n’a rien perdu de son charme, ni le jardin de son éclat. Béjart also worked as a theatre director (La Reine verte, Casta Diva, Cinq Nô modernes, A-6-Roc), staged operas (Salome, La Traviata, Don Giovanni), created films (Bhakti, Paradoxe sur le comédien), and published numerous books. In 2007, he presented the autobiographical piece La Vie du danseur, narrated by the two comic characters Zig et Puce.

While working on his final piece, Le Tour du monde en 80 minutes, Maurice Béjart died in Lausanne in November 2007 at the age of 80.