Sutra by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui defies easy description: choreographer, opera director, dancer, composer, pianist, draughtsman… and a maker who works across multiple disciplines and platforms including cinema, Broadway, music videos, opera, museums and community art. The director the Ballet of the Grand Théâtre de Genève appeared first on the dance firmament as a startlingly limber performer, and, immediately after, as a prolific choreographer with a remarkable ability to create worlds entire to themselves, worlds where movement and music and architecture meld seamlessly.

While artistic director of Eastman, his contemporary dance company founded in 2010, and associate artist at London’s Sadler’s Wells and Théâtre National de Bretagne in Rennes, Cherkaoui also helmed Ballet Vlaanderen (Royal Ballet of Flanders) between 2015 and 2022. His journey as a ballet choreographer, though, began more than fifteen years ago. The first invitation to the realm of western classical dance came from Jean-Christophe Maillot and Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo for whom he made In Memoriam (2004), early in his career: this relationship also produced the unflinching yet beautiful gaze on colonial legacy, Mea Culpa (2006), and 2017’s sombre reflection
around mortality, Memento Mori.

Loin (2005) originally made for the Grand Théâtre du Genève, End (2006) for the Cullberg Ballet, L’Homme de Bois (2006) for the Royal Danish Ballet, Labyrinth (2011) for the Dutch National Ballet, Boléro (2013) for the Paris Opera Ballet, with choreographer Damien Jalet and performance artist Marina Abramović, L’Oiseau de Feu (2015) for Stuttgart Ballet, Medusa (2019) for the Royal Ballet in London, and Laid in Earth (2021) for the English National Ballet were the result of memorable encounters with ballet companies across Europe. Cherkaoui made Fall (2015), Exhibition (2016) and Requiem (2017) with the dancers of the Royal Ballet of Flanders after joining the company as artistic director. He has also created pieces for celebrated principal dancers like Natalia Osipova (the trio Qutb, 2016), Carlos Acosta (the duet Mermaid, 2017), Marie-Agnès Gillot and Friedemann Vogel (a site-responsive duet from Firebird for the Fondation Louis Vuitton, 2017).

Cherkaoui first experienced the world of opera when he was invited to choreograph Der Ring des Nibelungen (2010-2013), directed by Guy Cassiers at Teatro alla Scala in Milan. As opera director he debuted at La Monnaie with the creation of Shell Shock, A Requiem of War (2014), by Nicholas Lens and Nick Cave. Since then he directed Jean-Philippe Rameau’s baroque opus Les Indes galantes (2016), Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Alceste (2019), and Toshio Hosokawa’s Hanjo (2023) at Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, Philip Glass’s minimalist Satyagraha (2017) at Theater Basel, Komische Oper Berlin and Opera Vlaanderen, Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (2018) with Damien Jalet at Opera Vlaanderen, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Idomeneo (2024) at the Grand Théâtre de Genève.

His affinity for ballet and opera has led to some of his most enduring and high-profile works, and exciting cross-arts collaborations with visual artists (Marina Abramović, Amine Amharech, Hans Op de Beeck, Chiharu Shiota…), designers (Hedi Slimane, Karl Lagerfeld, Riccardo Tisci, Jan-Jan Van Essche, Dries Van Noten, Yuima Nakazato…) and musicians (A Filetta, Woodkid, Felix Buxton, to cite just a few).

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s contemporary dance productions have been fêted across the globe, right from the début full-length, Nijinski Award-winning Rien de Rien (2000) and early company works like Foi (2003), Origine (2008) to the more recent Fractus V (2015), Nomad (2019) and Vlaemsch (chez moi) (2022). Cherkaoui’s insatiable curiosity about other movement languages and artistic legacies led to virtuosic and moving experiences including zero degrees (2005) alongside Akram Khan, Sutra (2008) for the warrior monks of the Shaolin Temple in Henan, China, Dunas (2009) with flamenca Maria
Pagés, Play (2011) beside kutchipudi danseuse Shantala Shivalingappa, Session (2019), with Irish traditional dance exponent Colin Dunne, and latterly, an Accident / a Life (2024), a dance-theatre solo directed with and for Marc Brew.

The last decade has seen increased forays into choreography for cinema, theatre and pop music. Collaborations with filmmaker Joe Wright resulted in memorable celluloid ventures (such as Anna Karenina in 2012 and Cyrano in 2022). Cherkaoui teamed up with Wright as co-director and choreographer on a searing stage adaptation of Aimé Césaire’s A Season in the Congo (2013) as well. He also choreographed Lyndsey Turner’s 2015 production of Hamlet at the Barbican Centre in London. With Bunkamura in Tokyo, he directed Pluto (2015), based on the award-winning manga series by Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki, and Evangelion Beyond (2023), an original play showing an alternative version of Hideaki Anno’s Evangelion franchise.

Since the mid-2010s, Cherkaoui has choreographed several of Beyoncé’s music videos and stage performances, beginning with a medley performance of Lemonade for the 2017 Grammy Awards and continuing right up to the music video of 2019’s Spirit, the single originally composed for the soundtrack of The Lion King. In the same year, Cherkaoui made his Broadway debut as choreographer for the Alanis Morissette musical Jagged Little Pill, directed by Diane Paulus and with a book by Diablo Cody, for which he picked up a Tony Awards nomination in the Best Choreography for a Musical category, the first Belgian artist to do so. He is also the movement director behind the 2022 revival of Michel Berger and Luc Plamondon’s rock-opera Starmania, which was laurelled with a Q d’Or, two Molières and two Trophées de la Comédie Musicale. Most recently, he choreographed several songs in Madonna’s CELEBRATION tour, among others Like a Prayer and Holiday.

And indeed, the awards and nominations are another useful shorthand for the range at hand. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s work has picked up a staggering number, including two Olivier Awards, three Tanz Awards, a Giraldillo Award, the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award, an Ultima from the Flemish government, and the Kairos Prize for his services to art and culture. There are more unusual ones too, such as a Fred and Adele Astaire Award – otherwise known as the Oscars of dance in cinema – for his choreography of Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina starring Keira Knightley and Jude Law, and the title of “young artist for intercultural dialogue between the Arab World and the West”, conferred by UNESCO in 2011. Among the latest? The 2019 Fedora–Van Cleefs Prize for Ballet for Invisible Cities, which he choreographed, and co-directed with Leo Warner, as well as an MTV Video Music Awards nomination for Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Apeshit, shot at the Louvre Museum in Paris. In 2023, the King of Belgium announced that Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui will be conferred the title of Baron, the first Belgian Baron of North African descent.

Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise.

Gormley’s work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK and internationally with exhibitions at the Long Museum, Shanghai (2017); National Portrait Gallery, London (2016); Forte di Belvedere, Florence (2015); Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (2014); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia (2012); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2012); The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2010); Hayward Gallery, London (2007); Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (1993) and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (1989). Permanent public works include the Angel of the North (Gateshead, England), Another Place (Crosby Beach, England), Inside Australia (Lake Ballard, Western Australia) Exposure (Lelystad, The Netherlands) and Chord (MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA).

Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999, the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture in 2007, the Obayashi Prize in 2012 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2013. In 1997 he was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) and was made a knight in the New Year’s Honours list in 2014. He is an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an honorary doctor of the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge. Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003.

Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950.