"FAUST" Le Ballets de Monte Carlo video version

Faust

Music: Franz Liszt, Faust Symphony

Jean-Christophe Maillot approaches the romantic myth as a story of inner fracture. For this production he chooses a rare and demanding genre — the symphonic ballet, constructing a choreographic narrative within Liszt’s powerful, multilayered score.

Maillot’s dance language is recognisable from the very first movement. This is a ballet where beauty is born not of pose, but of tension between bodies, of the instant before touch, of a pause filled with meaning. The movement vocabulary is at once classically precise and strikingly alive — lines break, balance wavers, and from this emerges a sense of authenticity.

The protagonist, torn between a thirst for knowledge, belief in meaning, and a painful awareness of the limits of body, time, and life itself, stands between three forces embodied in figures: Faust himself — a man of doubt and desire; Marguerite — earthly and spiritual beauty, the feminine ideal; and Mephistopheles — the incarnation of absolute evil.

Maillot sharpens the relationships between these characters to an extreme, transforming dance into a drama of passions, conflicts, and metaphysical choice. The choreography demands not only technical mastery, but total psychological identification with the role — Faust must be lived through. The performers do not display form; they think through movement.

The distinctive beauty of Maillot’s dance lies in vulnerability. His characters rarely “win”; they doubt, resist, attract, and repel. Masculine and feminine exist not as roles, but as forces in constant dialogue. This is why his ballets feel simultaneously sensual and intellectual, fragile and powerful.

The ballet is dedicated to Maurice Béjart, for whom the figure of Faust was one of the most compelling.