NORWEGIAN NATIONAL BALLET
Artistic Director Ingrid Lorentzen

LIGHT OF PASSAGE
Crystal Pite | Choreography
Henryk Mikołaj Górecki | Music
Symphony n°3 : « Sorrowful songs »
Jay Gower Taylor | Set Designer
Nancy Bryant | Costumes
Tom Visser | Lights

With the dancers of the Norwegian National Ballet
Recorded music

ABOUT THE SHOW

The dazzling Norwegian National Ballet is back at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées with a new work by the brilliant Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite.

In September 2014, TranscenDanses inaugurated its very first season, bringing the breathtaking Norwegian National Ballet to Paris for the first time. Audiences were captivated by the virtuosity of the dancers (in a special evening dedicated to Jirì Kylián). At the cutting edge of innovation, this technically brilliant troupe returned to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 2017 to present A Swan Lake by the visionary Alexander Ekman, which was an overwhelming hit. The company has developed numerous emblematic collaborations with some of the biggest names on the contemporary stage under the impulse of Ingrid Lorentzen, who has been its director since 2012. For its third visit to TranscenDanses, the Norwegian National Ballet is offering the Parisian public the opportunity to discover the Crystal Pite’s latest creation: Light of Passage. Light of Passage, performed at the Royal Ballet in 2022 and premiered at the Norwegian National Ballet in April 2023, revisits her short piece Flight Pattern, which won a prestigious Laurence Olivier Award. In this large-scale work in three acts, based on the three movements of Górecki’s 3rd Symphony “Sorrowful Songs”, Crystal Pite addresses an issue close to her heart, which she describes as “the story of our time”: the refugee crisis and, by extension, the crisis of children’s rights. The author of Body and Soul and Animation, adept at reworking neoclassicism with a 21st-century twist, has created a moving and touching piece that matches this great Nordic ensemble’s quality of interpretation.

Co-production with the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées