Forces is a double dance bill that brings together two powerful works by two women at the choreographic forefront of our time, who have been invited to recreate these iconic programmes from their respective repertoires with the Geneva Ballet Company

Aszure Barton, an alumna of Canada’s National Ballet School, has been creating dances for over 25 years. She has been guest choreographer in prestigious institutions, such as the English National Ballet to the Nederland Dans Theater, the Martha Graham Dance Company and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Her works have been performed at the Paris Opera, New York’s Lincoln Center and the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, among others. In BUSK, created in 2010 for the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York, Aszure Barton invites us to enjoy the fragility, tenderness, and resilience that exist within the human experience. BUSK is an attentive gaze cast on the physical unfurling of the human psyche to a spirited score. Every facet of the dancers’ bodies and minds are engaged. The dancers must tap into the collective – a hive mind – in order to execute Barton’s layered and intricate choreographic structures which then give way to the nuance of each individual. Deriving its title as much from the Spanish word for search (buscar) as from the English verb for street performance, the performers of BUSK present themselves as they are and invite the audience to enter with them in the search for the inherent wisdom of the body.
> read about Busk by Aszure Barton

First a dancer with the Batsheva Dance Company, Sharon Eyal became its associate artistic director and later resident choreographer. She founded her own company L‑E‑V in Tel Aviv with Gai Behar in 2013. Trepidation, loneliness, strength and resilience are the four characteristics that dominate Sharon Eyal’s choreography of Strong, created with Staatsballett Berlin in 2019, a work that carries the characteristic movements and distinctive music of Eyal’s pieces: a techno soundtrack alternated by drums and bass as lights and movement project an ecstatic experience for seventeen spellbound dancers. Strong develops a magnetism of bodies between the dancers which, as they come closer together, increase the eponymous strength of this performance. Strong is a composition of nervous movements, seemingly exhausting but light and supple. The strength is in the group, but also in the alienation and solitude. The result is emblematic of the cohesion that derives from a common mission or belief. Sharon Eyal’s work is about the shared pleasure that sometimes comes from pain, as the dancers know well, or the pleasure of fighting with the same strength for the same goals.