bolero de ravel - Maurice Béjart dance group

Mezmerizing...

Maurice Béjart (January 1, 1927 – November 22, 2007) was a French and Swiss choreographer who ran the Béjart Ballet Lausanne in Switzerland. He was the son of the French philosopher Gaston Berger.

He was born in Marseille, France and founded the Ballet de l'Etoile company in 1954. In 1960 he founded the Ballet du XXe Siècle in Brussels.

In 1987 he moved to Lausanne in Switzerland, where he founded the Béjart Ballet Lausanne, one of the most famous and successful dance companies in the world.

He made significant contribution to the Persian Ballet Repertoire in the late 1960s and 1970s performing at the famous Roudaki Hall in Tehran created under the supervision of the former Empress of Iran, with whom he kept strong ties of friendship over the years.^[1]

Among his works is a thoroughly revised version of The Nutcracker, presumably inspired by his own life story, which he staged in 2000. It still uses Tchaikovsky's original score, but completely scraps the original plot and characters, instead supplying a new story about a boy's efforts to re-connect with his mother. We also are given a look into the boy's strange sexual fantasies. The production design is full of erotic images — some of which are most likely shocking to many, such as wombs and vaginal openings. [1] One of the characters is Marius Petipa, who becomes Mephisto. Another character is called Felix the Cat, presumably after the famous cartoon character. The production has been issued on DVD.

---

Boléro

Boléro is a one-movement orchestral piece by Maurice Ravel. Originally composed as a ballet, the piece, which premiered in 1928, is considered Ravel's most famous musical composition.^[1]

Before Boléro, Ravel had composed large scale ballets (such as Daphnis et Chloé, composed for the Ballets Russes 1909–1912), suites for the ballet (such as the second orchestral version of Ma Mère l'Oye, 1912), and one-movement dance pieces (such as La Valse, 1906-1920). Apart from such compositions intended for a staged dance performance, Ravel had demonstrated an interest in composing re-styled dances, from his earliest successes (the 1895 Menuet and the 1899 Pavane) to his more mature works like Le Tombeau de Couperin (which takes the format of a dance suite).

Boléro epitomises Ravel's preoccupation with restyling and reinventing dance movements. It was also one of the last pieces he composed before illness forced him into retirement: the two piano concertos and the Don Quichotte à Dulcinée song cycle were the only compositions that followed Boléro.
...
Uses of Boléro

The melody of Boléro is well-known to many and it is often featured in different occasions in popular culture, including motion pictures, video games and popular music.

It was used in the movie 10 to great acclaim; the character played by Bo Derek kept restarting the music on a phonograph, while trying to seduce the character played by Dudley Moore. Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar used Boléro for a long sequence of the 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto used the greater part of Boléro for a sequence in his Fantasia-like 1977 film Allegro non troppo. The music is also used, to great effect, in the circus-ring climax to the 1995 movie, Funny Bones.

Boléro was used in the Doctor Who episode "The Impossible Planet". It has also been used as background music in the Japanese anime series Digimon (seasons 1, 2; movies 1, 2). In the original Digimon Adventure movie, Boléro is the main motif in connection to the Agumon released and his evolution. It is also used partially in season 3 as one of the character's ringtones. It was used in a scene of the movie The New Guy.

Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto composed the piece Bolerish, a 13-minute orchestral homage to Ravel's Bolero, for the Brian De Palma film Femme Fatale. He also composed and performed a solo piano version of Bolerish.

A rework of Boléro is found on Angélique Kidjo's album Djin Djin, which starts mostly a cappella by means of multiple overdubbing before some building to an appropriate crescendo with some additional instrumentation. Boléro is integrated into Rufus Wainwright's song "Oh What a World". The melody also formed the basis of Patti Page's 1951 hit song "All My Love" (which was subtitled "Boléro").

The rock band The James Gang included a section of Boléro in their song "The Bomber" on the initial pressing of their 1970 album James Gang Rides Again. However, Ravel's estate (which still owns copyright on the work) objected, and as a result the band edited that section out of the song on subsequent pressings of the album. The CD re-issue of Rides Again contains the full version of "The Bomber", with the Boléro section restored. Similarly, Ravel's estate has objected to Frank Zappa's treatment of Boléro on his 1991 live album The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life, and has forced omission of the song from the European release of the album. English electronica group Goldfrapp have loosely used the melody in an instrumental song called "Felt Mountain" on their debut album Felt Mountain. Deep Purple's famous track Child In Time (from In Rock) also features a section of Boléro just before Blackmore's guitar solo.