From Dimitris Papaioannou to Andonis Foniadakis, contemporary Greece shines in dance.
This is also the case in Athens, where the management of the national company has been entrusted to a singular creator.
LE FIGARO.
- How would you define the ballet of the National Opera of Greece?
Konstantinos RIGOS.
- Typically, it is characteristic of opera ballets.
It is made up of sixty dancers.
We use 40 to 50 per production.
We were able to hire eight additional young dancers with the help of the donation from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
Our ballet has the hierarchy found in most classical companies.
The dancers are divided into four categories: principal dancers, soloists, coryphées and corps de ballet.
We are linked to a school where children enter the preparatory cycle at the age of 12 and professional ballet lessons at the age of 18.
It has three classes and about fifteen students per class.
Before leaving school, students audition to enter ballet.
It gives about thirty shows every year.
Twenty in three productions at the opera and ten for the alternative scene.
The first creation of the year will be a new
Don Quixote
.
Followed by a cover of
Three Rooms,
a mixed program that entered the repertoire last year with
Petite mort
by Kylian,
Minus 16
by Ohad Naharin and
“Ison” for a child
that I choreographed to music by Giorgos Koumendakis.
Another great piece is about to be announced.
The benchmarks you mention are very classic.
Do you yourself define yourself as a classical choreographer?
Not completely.
I trained as a dancer at the National School of Dance in Athens, I work as a choreographer but also as a theater director.
Last year, I staged
Les Cavaliers
d'Aristophane at the Théâtre d'Épidaure.
I was also artistic director of the Dance-Theater of Northern Greece, an integral part of the National Theater of Northern Greece, a center of contemporary dance.
However, the virtuosity of the classical language appeals to me.
I like to push bodies to the limits.
Read also
The incredible renaissance of the Athens Opera
Don Quixote
,
Swan Lake
,
The Nutcracker
are in the Athens repertoire.
How do you treat them?
The new
Don Quixote
which opens the ballet season has been re-edited as closely as possible to the original version of Marius Petipa by Thiago Bordin, a Brazilian choreographer who has danced at the NDT and at Neumeier.
I invited Daniil Simkin and Maia Makhateli to dance it.
It's a way of opening up Athens to the international scene, a concern that matters to me.
Personally, when I take hold of the classics, it's to give them a re-reading.
My Clara is in a European city, prisoner in her glass room.
Her teenage dreams and nightmares play out on stage.
My
lake
has no more water.
I evoke the environmental problems there, but I remain in dialogue with the emblematic parts of the original ballet of Petipa and Ivanov.
What kind of dancers are you looking for?
Most of the company's dancers were already there when I arrived.
I need dancers of classical technique capable of dancing all styles of contemporary dance.
What interests me is to create a language between dance and theatrical performance.
“Don Quixote”, from November 26 to December 31, 2022. “Three Rooms”, from February 15 to 19, 2023.