What to Expect from Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels at The French May Arts Festival

As the French May Arts Festival advances towards its 30th anniversary, we explore the riveting facets of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels and take a closer look at the ties between the high-jewellery maison and choreography.

The relationship between dance and jewels is, like a great mystery, complex and enigmatic. As we go back in time, to when Aztec priests performed ritual dances wearing headdresses overflowing with feathers and beads, or marvel at the displays of ballet attire in London’s V&A museum, or behold Barbara Karinska’s exquisite costume designs for Tchaikovsky’s Jewels, it’s clear how closely the two are intertwined.

“The encounter in the late 1940s between Claude Arpels and renowned choreographer George Balanchine [co- founder of the New York City Ballet] provided the inspiration for Jewels in 1967, the first ever full-length abstract ballet, whose relevance and timelessness has made it to this day one of most renowned works of the 20th century,” says Julie Clody, Van Cleef & Arpels’ Hong Kong and Macau managing director.

Van Cleef & Arpels has been a patron of the choreographic arts since the early 1940s, when the house first crafted its illustrious Delicate Dancers brooch in homage to Louis Arpels’ lifelong adoration for ballet and his frequent visits to the Opera Garnier. “To this day the graceful flair of the art of ballet remains one that’s closely associated with the maison’s delicate and poetic high-jewellery creations,” Clody remarks.

If for centuries, classical ballet has stood among the greatest of performance arts, some would contend that contemporary dance also deserves a place of similar distinction. Hearteningly, this thought came to the maison in 2020, when it began celebrating a crop of new choreographers and dancers its annual Dance Reflections
by Van Cleef & Arpels event.

“With the launch of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, the maison furthered its commitment to acting as a custodian and proponent of modern dance,” Clody says. “As much as Balanchine was at the forefront of dance creation in 1967, so too are the choreographers and dancers we’re working with and supporting today through this initiative. The programme’s aim is to present a new vision of the art of movement in all its diversity, and raise new questions as to the possibilities of dance.”

Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels this year partners with the French May Arts Festival (previously known as Le French May), marking the programme’s Asian debut and coinciding with an important anniversary for the festival. “We’re delighted to once again be working so closely with this important component of Hong Kong’s cultural scene,” says Clody, “especially as 2023 marks a milestone for the French May, which has been bringing creativity to communities across the city for 30 years.”

The French May’s dazzling array of dance performances this year is sure to captivate all senses. A sumptuous assortment of acts staged in venues such as M+, West Kowloon Art Park, PMQ, Freespace, and the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA) promises to become a spectacle like no other. “Each performance making up the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival in Hong Kong have been created by world-class choreographers,” says Clody, “and are either cutting-edge original pieces or leading repertory productions coming to Hong Kong for the first time.”

Among the many productions, those of French choreographer Christian Rizzo stand out. You and You and You and Me and You and Us and You …, for instance, has been in gestation since 2022, when Rizzo rehearsed with a coterie of independent dancers and artists from the HKAPA and the Hong Kong Ballet, including Joseph Lee (artistic director of Unlock Dancing Plaza) and Ma Renjie (who recently performed the role of Fritz in Terence Kohler’s The Nutcracker). Another venture by Rizzo, co-created with Van Cleef & Arpels, sees him collaborating with rising Turkish dancer Kerem Gelebek. Titled Sakinan göze çop batar (An over- protected eye always gets sand in it), it combines installation, dance and theatre in a beautiful setting. On stage are laid out treasured artefacts of immense symbolic value that Gelebek interacts with gracefully, juxtaposing solemnity and passion to captivating effect. “When I approached Kerem for a solo performance, my first desire was to concentrate on melancholy and exile”, says Rizzo. “The concept of exile is no longer confined to a territory but to the self: exiling oneself from oneself. Melancholy, however, remains obligatory. Kerem manipulates the space on stage and lays down danced fragments such as haikus, sketches, or notes that, together, form a collection of thoughts born from movement.”

Mirroring Van Cleef & Arpels’s age- old fascinations with abstract ballet in a contemporary manner is Polish-born France-based choreographer Ola Maciejewska, with two pieces set to be staged during the French May: Bombyx Mori and Loïe Fuller: Research. “In both pieces that I’m presenting, I’m using the choreographic object for the serpentine dances invented by Loie Fuller,” says Maciejewska. She refers to the late 19th-century American pioneer who invented a revolutionary type of burlesque dance that incorporates yards of silk, which billow and flutter with movement, catching light and creating shapes reminiscent of flowers, fire, clouds and birds. “What actually happens when we confront this historical reference and all its traces in the context of our times?” Maciejewska asks. “The work explores how and what we see when we look. I like to play with the shifting nature of the appearance and its content.”

Yet if Fuller’s performances at Folies Bergére at the turn of the century could be described as grandiose and ethereal, Maciejewska’s choreographic paean to her unceasing muse conjures a sepulchral spectacle, in the best sense of the words. Bombyx Mori, for example, features silhouettes swathed in black fabric that solemnly move in symmetric formations.

And though the piece is named after the species of a domestic silk worm and is meant to engender a metaphor for metamorphosis and “the hybrid nature of things”, it could also – whether by design or not – be read as a sobriquet for Greek Fates, in which each dancer is shrouded in their own character yet all as one, a butterfly or chrysalis ready to take flight, not dissimilar to Damien Jalet’s famed Les Médusés.

Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels is an otherworldly flight of fancy, captivating with its bewitching swirls and twirls. It feels like a precious jewel, shimmering brightly when its expertly polished performances unravel. Like a dreamscape, each act seems to take its audience further down the rabbit hole and closer to discovering the power of identity hidden within their own reflections.