Ballett Zürich with Timeframed

Opera House, Zurich
January 30, 2026

The programme, Timeframed, which Zürich Ballett premiered in January was one of those rare evenings that not only took you from highlight to highlight but also demonstrated the company’s high prowess and versatility. Three of the evening’s four pieces were variations on the pas de deux; from the neoclassical non-narrative, to explosions into a group, to the intimate relationship between a woman and a man. They were contrasted by a modern, energy-loaded piece for 23 dancers.

The evening started with William Forsythe’s New Suite from 2012. It consists of eight pas de deux from three earlier pieces, which Forsythe reworked and put together like a poem in eight verses, each creating an atmosphere from a story once told, to music by G.F. Handel, Luciano Berio and J.S. Bach.

The first three pas de deux to Handel are in Forsythe’s characteristic ballet vocabulary with off-balances and overextensions. Flexed feet and jazzy hips are added to the ones to Berio’s music, composed around 1980. The last in this section is slow. Dancers Yun-Su Park and Erik Kim encircled each other with their arms or filled out the music as if floating in space. They were wonderful, but so were the other seven couples.

Lucas Valente’s new piece, Bare, makes a strong contrast to Forsythe’s clear lines and beautiful structures. Brazilian-born, Valente was a dancer with the Ballett Zürich from 2017 until this season, during which he appears as a guest dancer. Bare is his first piece for the company.

Designer Christopher Parker dresses the 23 dancers in black overall-like trousers and boxing shoes. Two huge microphones hang from the ceiling, which amplify the soundscape, all made by the dancers. You hear them jump, slap their bodies or talk to each other, saying things like, ‘push,’ ‘watch out’ or ‘over ok.’ With extremely high energy level they slide and jump across the stage at times mixing hip-hop movements with angular arms reminiscent of Marco Goecke’s style.

At one point a woman places a metronome on the floor. The rest of the piece becomes a dialogue with its metric ticking. The dancers form lines, shapes and beautiful, intricate images. At one point they create a V-shape that makes them look like a flight of migratory birds.

The light by Martin Gebhardt is muted, at times the dancers appear in backlight making them look like shadows or they turn into mysterious figures in a foggy night. It was mesmerizing, and it will be interesting to see what Valente comes up with next.

From those dark realms to Andonis Foniadakis, and another new piece, which does indeed take the viewer into Orbit, as the title suggests. Four couples are clad in golden glittering leotards, Anastasios Sofroniou’s costumes making them look like a blinking galaxy in a dark sky. But their world is not one of celestial peace. In choreography that is classical with the women on pointe, mixed with some jazz, the couples appear alone, but at times all clash together in a cluster.

The last piece, Hans van Manen’s Live, from 1979, tells the story of a break-up. It was one of the first ballets to use live filming as part of the performance. A cameraman, Karim Fawas, enters, picks up a camera lying on stage and films the audience, making us aware of our voyeuristic part in the upcoming drama. A woman, Sujung Lim, enters in a short red ballet skirt and point-shoes. As he films her, the images are projected in black and white onto a large screen upstage. He then zooms in on a hand, an arm, her arched feet. Things you never see so clearly from the auditorium, because even the first row is too far away.

A man, Joel Woellner, enters and exits again. She, still filmed live, follows him into the foyer, a big open space with columns and staircases. Here they dance before he leaves. A recorded flash-back from their practicing in the studio follows, ending with him sexually assaulting her and she slapping his face. Then we are back in the foyer, the cameraman again filming live. She puts on her coat, leaves the theatre and crosses the huge square in front of the opera house walking towards the taxi stands.

Live is an interesting piece that plays with perception. In the theatre, it is hard not to look at the close-up, even if it does almost feel like prying into her inmost privacy. It is also interesting to see the dancers invade our, the audience’s space, the foyer, where we had shortly before enjoyed a glass of wine.

Each piece, deservedly, received a standing ovation, the applause also a clear appreciation of Cathy Marston’s work since she took over the directorship of the company in 2023, and an indication that the Opera House made the right decision when they extended her contract until the 2029/30 season.