The Bernstein Experience

Dutch National Ballet brings together three internationally acclaimed new classics and spotlights two luminaries of twentieth-century American art: Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein.

DANCES AT A GATHERING

Robbins’ Dances at a Gathering has been called the ‘quintessential piano ballet’. An inventive, virtuoso whirlwind of emotions, it marks a milestone in twentieth-century ballet. First performed by an all-star cast at the New York City Ballet in 1969, the choreography is set to a sequence of piano compositions by Chopin, their shifting moods inspiring in a series of alternating formations that visualise the full spectrum of human interaction.

SERENADE AFTER PLATO’S SYMPOSIUM

‘Surely it’s the ballet premiere of the year; maybe it’s the greatest ballet yet of the 21st century’, raved The New York Times following the world première of Alexei Ratmansky’s Serenade after Plato’s Symposium. Like Bernstein, Ratmansky borrowed her inspiration from the Plato text, in which a group of prominent Athenians debate the nature and purpose of love. The result is a sublimely musical choreography in which seven male dancers express diverse ways of ‘being’, with a female soloist symbolising Eros, or love.

CHROMA

In 2006, Wayne McGregor turned the British ballet world upside-down with Chroma, a radical work set to an explosive score by Joby Talbot. Distinguished with an Olivier Award for choreography, today it is danced all over the world.