MARIE ANTOINETTE

"If she holds herself upright, she is the statue of beauty; when she moves, she is grace in person," wrote the English writer and artist Horace Walpole in the 18th century about the queen of France around whom legends swirl: Marie Antoinette. For the French choreographer Thierry Malandain, the dazzling figure of French history was the inspiration for a ballet that premiered in 2019 with his ensemble, the Malandain Ballet Biarritz, at the very place that Marie Antoinette inaugurated on May 16, 1770, on the occasion of her wedding to Louis XVI: the Opéra Royal Château de Versailles.

Marie Antoinette's life in Versailles is also the focus of Malandain's ballet, which the choreographer created to the music of two contemporaries of Antoinette – Joseph Haydn and Christoph Willibald Gluck. The piece depicts her arrival at court, the day of her wedding, the inauguration of the opera with Jean-Baptiste Lully's Persée – as a ballet within a ballet – the attempt to escape that ultimately led to her downfall, and those infamous parties and balls that are associated with the queen.

In his movement language, Malandain's individual neoclassicism also incorporates dance elements from another era. He unfolds baroque gestures while remaining true to a powerful and modern style. In his choreography, Malandain portrays a queen who not only indulged in splendor, abundance, and vanity but also became the plaything of others throughout her life – her mother, her court society, the French public – and who sank into loneliness and melancholy.

Her search for distraction and her penchant for entertainment become the expressive means of the ballet, which shows Marie Antoinette in her greatest role, that of the queen of France: "... but the star of misfortune was written on her forehead. For her, who loved the theater, the curtain fell on the delightful comedy with the sound of a steel blade," says Malandain.