Royal Ballet of Flanders (Belgium) has announced that choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui has been appointed as the company’s new artistic director. Cherkaoui will commence in the role in September of this year. Cherkaoui succeeds current director Assis Carreiro.
Cherkaoui is the founding artistic director of contemporary dance company Eastman, based in Belgium. He is looking forward to the change and challenge of working in a ballet company. “At Eastman I open up specific themes that allow contemporary dancers to translate them into earthbound gestures with strong contrasts and an animalistic flexibility, but in ballet I can develop feather-light pointe movements to draw outlines in space in a more calligraphic way,” remarks Cherkaoui. “In time I also want to be able to reverse those ‘differences’. I find it exciting to let the two worlds flow into one another without losing any of their fascinating differences or nuances.”
Born in Antwerp, where Royal Ballet of Flanders is based, Cherkaoui has followed the development of the company with interest. “The talent, technical virtuosity, sensitivity and musicality of its dancers have always inspired me, so it was an honour for me to share a piece from my own repertoire with the company last season. Faun was a first step towards an exchange of repertoire with the ballet company,” he comments.
Cherkaoui is no stranger to ballet companies and has worked with the Monte Carlo Ballet, Le Grand Ballet de l’Opéra de Genève, The Royal Danish Ballet, Het Nationaal Ballet in the Netherlands and the dancers at the Paris Opera. He is fascinated by the interaction between contemporary dance and classical ballet. “The course I will be seeking to pursue with the company is one of reconciliation,” he says. “For a number of years there has been a constantly growing exchange between the different dance disciplines, as classical ballet and contemporary dance increasingly complement each other. Although there is always a key idea running through the content of my work, what I am able to achieve with ballet dancers in terms of form and technique is very different from my work with contemporary dancers. I am therefore looking forward to seeing these differences evolve further in future.”