La Bayadère

Rachel Beaujean is responsible for the staging and additional choreography and worked alongside Kalpana Raghuraman, Dr Priya Srinivasan and Ted Brandsen on the concept and libretto. The sets and costumes by Jérôme Kaplan are inspired by seventeenth-century India but also reference other eras and cultures. The music of Ludwig Minkus, whose melodic and rhythmic compositions were instrumental in shaping nineteenth-century classical ballet, forms the musical backbone of this production.

A tragic love story 

The new La Bayadère is set in Southeast India, where the Dutch established several trading posts during the era of the Dutch East India Company. The sincere love between Nikiya, a beautiful Indian dancer, and Solor, a captain of mixed heritage, challenges prevailing norms and expectations. However, Solor allows himself to be manipulated by the Dutch governor William Carel Hartsinck, who forces him to marry his daughter, Alida. When Alida discovers that Solor already loves another, she decides to eliminate Nikiya. Overcome with grief and guilt, Solor drifts into a dream state. In the iconic ‘Kingdom of the Shades’, he sees Nikiya once more, but she remains out of reach. The consequences of the wrong choices will haunt him forever.

New perspectives

The new production of La Bayadère is based on fact rather than fiction. Its original dance gems remain intact, but they are set in a vision that is compatible with our times bringing fresh perspectives highlighting the many invisible bodies that are part of the history of the ballet.