Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances ll

2025 · Brussels City Ballet

Originally created for Hessisches Staatsballett in 2019, Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances was restaged for Brussels City Ballet in 2025.

The restaging became an opportunity to look at choreography as something that exists between its original creation and every body that subsequently performs it. The choreography remained recognisable, but the dancers, their physicalities, relationships and ways of inhabiting the material inevitably changed it.

Rather than attempting to reproduce the 2019 performance, the process treated the existing choreography as material to be transmitted and reactivated. The work therefore became a dialogue between past and present: between choreography as something fixed in memory, and choreography as something that only truly exists when it passes through a living body.

Six years later, the same musical and choreographic structure produced a different work — not because the original was abandoned, but because restaging revealed how much of choreography is created anew each time it is danced.