National Ballet of Canada present William Yong’s choreography of three works for string quartet by Benjamin Britten at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées from 12-15 October. Yong’s UtopiVerse, which premiered in March 2024 at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, appears as part of a triple bill alongside Angels’ Atlas, Crystal Pite’s choreography of Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium. See behind the scenes of the creation of UtopiVerse here.
The piece is a multidisciplinary work that also draws on film from Thomas Payette, and presents an alternative way of seeing traditional notions of utopia, paradise lost, the Garden of Eden, human evolution and the meaning of God. It is inspired by the thinking of physicist Thomas Hertog, whose work imagined multiple universes, as well as Yong’s own experiences growing up in Hong Kong, on a boundary where “British colonialism met Chinese imperialism and capitalism coexisted uncomfortably with communism”. Read an interview with Yong about the project here.
Yong and Music Director David Briskin selected three works by Benjamin Britten to illuminate this exploration: String Quartet No.3 (1975), the String Quartet in F (1928), and the brisk, single-movement Alla Marcia (1933). Both Briskin and Yong saw in the music’s rich emotional spectrum to an apt mirror for the complex states of mind the ballet examines.
String Quartet No.3 (1976), one of Britten’s remarkable late works, has close links with Britten’s final opera Death in Venice. Its five-movement, arch-like structure is built around a serene central interlude for solo violin, framed by a fantastical ostinato movement and a bizarre, garish waltz; it closes with a serious, rueful passacaglia, ‘La Serenissima’. The 1928 Quartet in F, by contrast, is imbued with youthful energies across much of its 22-minute span, though tempered by a dark ending in F minor and an emotionally ambiguous slow movement.
Hans van Manen’s choreography of Britten’s String Quartet in F appeared in San Francisco Ballet’s four-part Van Manen: Dutch Grandmaster. In July his Variations for two couples concluded the San Francisco’s Ballet’s programme Starry Nights at Stanford Live; in April 2025 it receives seven performances at the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco. The work, first conceived for Dutch National Ballet in 2012, saw van Manen inspired by two dancing pairs, each with a very different character: the first lyrical and subdued, the second scintillatingly virtuosic. Britten’s music appears alongside that of Rautavaara, Bach, and Piazzolla.