Amelia

Director Robert Carsen and his creative team flood the stage with summer blossoms, drifts of autumn leaves, winter snows and thunderous spring storms. The cast of 140 are attired in elegant costumes inspired by late 1940s Dior. This mythical tale of a young queen, Alphise, determined to abdicate rather than contemplate an enforced marriage to a descendant of Boreas, is nothing less than highly-charged.

A lone ballerina dances with her reflection in Écho, a film directed by world-renowned choreographer Édouard Lock. Interpreted by the principal dancer of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Rachele Buriassi, this intimate solo piece was inspired by feelings of solitude experienced in lockdown. It begins with a ballerina in the familiar surroundings of a theatre, but the camera soon closes in on the figure and renders it almost abstract, disrupting one’s sense of time and space. An evocative score by James O’Callaghan enters into dialogue with Buriassi’s movements as she slips in and out of shadow and light, illusion and reality.

Canadas contemporary dance group La La La Human Steps performs Édouard Lock's "Human Sex" .

To bring together again, for the first time since their premiere on a December evening in Moscow, Tchaikovsky’s opera Iolanta and ballet The Nutcracker, was the audacious challenge that Russian stage director Dmitri Tcherniakov accepted for the Palais Garnier in Paris in March 2016 : a revolutionary production, which was to become one of the key events of the Paris Opera season.