O’de

2015

Château de Versailles

A collaboration with Château de Versailles inaugurating its newly renovated Water Theater grove with an original 10-minute performance. “It’s the first ballet in the grove since the time of Louis XIV,” said the artist Jean-Michel Othoniel, whose idea it was to include the company in the celebrations. The four-year project, led by the celebrated French landscape architect Louis Benech, reimagined André Le Nôtre’s long-neglected 18th-century hedged secret garden and outdoor theater as something far edgier, with angular, rusted steel-framed pools and Othoniel’s swirling gold-bead fountains based on the Baroque choreographer Raoul-Auger Feuillet’s shorthand notations of period dances. “It seems absolutely natural that this bosquet as it is now is here,” mused the Versailles president Catherine Pégard, as she sat in the shade of one of the new Japanese angelica trees and proudly took it all in. “It’s a totally contemporary work that is perfectly integrated into the park’s history. So harmonious.”

Choreography by Julia Eichten

O’de