Having collaborated with numerous international companies, and participated in prestigious events such as the Festival d’Avignon and the Venice Biennale, choreographer Marcos Morau is now bringing his unique choreographic language to the exceptional performers of the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève with Svatbata – a continuation of his exploration of the different visual and choreographic aspects of ritual (na svatbata means “the wedding” in Bulgarian), following Sonoma, Hermana, Folkå and Totentanz.

Reflecting a present in which individuals tend to emphasise their identities and singularities, Marcos Morau’s new work aims to evoke the distant past in which people shared their similarities more readily than their differences. With Svatbata, he invites us to gather beneath a starry sky, on any night of any year in history, to set off together in search of the secret meaning of existence, to celebrate life, and to challenge the questions that have motivated humanity since the beginning of time. Through the exploration of human sounds and gestures, via the rhythms of skin drums and the vibration of the ground beneath the performers’ feet, he wishes to interrogate this mysterious way; these ornaments that the bodies know and execute with a strange automatism inherited from previous generations. There is no mystery purer than that which hides its own origins. Bulgaria, a bridge between East and West, will be one of this work’s sources of inspiration. Like an ancestral world in which night-time skills of ornament (vocal, kinetic, material, floral) are involved each time a community attempts to fathom the thresholds through which the concrete world transcends itself, and opposites – life and death, love and war – come together.

All rituals are marriages of sorts. And marriage is the original meaning of the Svatbata: a dizzying confluence of vocal gestures and gestural song, capable of saying in every note, every step, every modulation and every variation, that mystery doesn’t go inward but outwards – that it only bursts forth, to deploy the infinity of its strata and nuances in all directions; to become a habitable space; a human garden of signals. And to remember that it’s from one and the same depth that arises both the movement of life, and the immobility of death. Marriages are, in a way, funerals.

Funerals are, in a way, weddings. Aren’t both rituals accompanied by flowers? Because without exception, everything – love, death and flowers – belongs to the Earth. Including dance.