Boléro Variations

Many boleros

Raimund Hoghe’s performances are rituals. In this way he exorcises his own demons as well as touching on universal themes. In a former life Hoghe was Pina Bausch’s dramaturge, and the Kaaitheater has presented nearly all his work.

After Swan Lake, 4 Acts and Sacre - The Rite of Spring, Hoghe again wanted to work on a well-known music and dance performance. This turned out to be Maurice Ravel’s Boléro. Hoghe: ‘Everyone is familiar with this short musical work and many artists have performed it or presented their own variations of it, including such choreographers as Maurice Béjart and Odile Duboc, and the conductors Leonard Bernstein and Benny Goodman. My first memory of the Boléro is the legendary performance by the figure skaters Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean at the 1984 Olympic Games in Sarajevo. But the bolero is also an eighteenth-century Spanish dance and a musical style that blew over from South America. Besame mucho for example is a bolero. I wanted to explore all these possibilities in my Boléro.’

For those who would like to discover, or rediscover, Ravel’s Boléro and many other boleros in a lucid and, to quote the French journal Mouvement, ‘mysterious and fascinating’ performance, there is just one name: Raimund Hoghe.