Online marathon will be opened with a magnificent Claude Brumachon’s Carmina Burana performed by the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève. Music composed by Carl Orff was interpreted many times at different venues all over the world, but “Secular songs for singers and choruses to be sung together with instruments and magical images” (as Orff has named music score) interpreted by Brumachon should be understood specially. So it is.

This is because Claude Brumachon is a choreographer and artist. It’s hard to believe that he has never studied classical dance, but graduated from the school of Fine Arts of Rouen. That’s why his view of the world — is a view of an artist. He doesn’t stage a ballet as much as he paint chorographical pictures. In these pictures he tends to truth and beauty, animate them with moving plastic of perfect body lines.

Painting and sculpture, two passions of Brumachon, are reflected in Carmina. Professors and art historians might use this ballet as “a conundrum” for students — to propose to guess what visual metaphor is hidden. But we will give a clue to our spectators: the first scene is inspired by Theodore Géericault’s work “The Raft of the Medusa”, and others — by works of Rodin and Giacometti…

Brumachon brings allusions not only from the past, but from the present also. This is why modernity literally breaks into the medieval plot. “Bataclan, airport in Brussel, beach in Tunis…Human drama supported by the vivid political discourse. Though it is written in the Medieval Age, it sounds like echo in 21th century despite our lazy and fragmentary memory. From the very beginning the humanity faces the same obscure issues and forces, the same catastrophes, and religious wars. The humanity develops cyclically, by passing from “the triumph of abundance to flood” — so the choreographer suggests.

In the context of today problems this ballet acts truly therapeutically. Heaviness of being, aggression and desperation are covered with tender artistic filter. You could look steadily and feel no hurt, but you should experience this fear and oppression to become stronger. It is not a narrative ballet where good fight with evil in so called “brown tricot”: the plot is an ideal rhythmic order in music that is answered by a plastic chaos in choreography. But limitless force of life will overcome as the force of action always wins with blessing of good fortune.