Firebird/Exhibition

With Firebird, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui offers a new take on the timeless Russian folk tale of the Firebird. The non-narrative version by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui centres around the morbid horror of the fire and the beauty of the renewed life that rises from it. At the crux is the power of a human being to be resurrected like a phoenix from the ashes. The music by the young Igor Stravinsky became his worldwide breakthrough.

His Exhibition, to Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition in the famous orchestration by Ravel, is a polemic of sorts, as the work is rarely visualised as a ballet. From the beginning, it was intended as an in memoriam for the painter Viktor Hartmann, full of thoughts of death and with an elegiac mood. Dreamlike scenes mingle with the desire to recapture an elusive past.