On tiptoe - About music and dance, in pairs Black Swan, White Swan - Romantic tales

"Your ballet has become a real mania. People no longer ask each other 'How are you?', but 'Have you seen Sleeping Beauty'?" wrote his brother, Modest, in a letter to Tchaikovsky. But it wasn't only the St Petersburg audience of the time who went crazy for the composer's melodies: his three ballets, Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, are still a cult classic from the dance stage to the silver screen. But what is the secret of these works? And how did Russia go from almost nothing to a ballet capital by the end of the 19th century? Great emotions and mystery are in store for those who attend the March event.

Dance and music: inseparable at first sight (and sound). Yet the relationship between choreographers and composers has been a turbulent and volatile one over the centuries. The composers of the first ballets, such as Jean-Baptiste Lully or Jean-Philippe Rameau, were still respected artists. Later, with the birth of the ballet of the plot, the composer's main task became to submit to the demands of the dance-master. Even Mozart himself was no exception: his name was not even mentioned on the stage for the only performance of his ballet music. By the time of the Romantic ballets, most composers thought of dance music as a living, except for one: a certain Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The next turning point came with Sergei Gyagilev, who invited the best composers of the day to join his Russian Ballet, so that by the second half of the twentieth century music and dance could once again be on equal footing.

A series of performances by dance critic Léna Megyeri and music historian Ádám Bősze will bring to life the shared history of the two arts, with legendary collaborations, great rivalries and subversive masterpieces from the court of the Sun King to the present day.

Performers: Léna Megyeri, Ádám Bősze

Duration: 70 minutes