Louis Vuitton FW22 Men’s Fashion Show

Yoann Bourgeois collaborated with Louis Vuitton and the late creative director Virgil Abloh, as the Theatrical Director and Choreographer of the highly anticipated Men’s FW 2022 Shows in Paris.

Yoann created an ethereal and fantastical performance, set within a surrealistic “Dreamhouse,” while the collection unfolded on 20 performers and 67 models. Consolidating the many themes and messaging which Abloh’s eight seasons at the house discussed and brought to the table, and long fascinated by ideas of weightlessness and the physics of suspension, Yoann choreographed the acrobats to effortlessly float through the air onto a never-ending staircase and dance through the set onto a rotating bed and rooftop chimney, before models descended onto the runway.

Bourgeois’s breathtaking, poetic spectacles are an entanglement of disciplines that connect aerial choreography, dance, and acrobatics in an exploration of the constraints of one’s physical forces, counterbalanced by an indistinguishable precision and execution.

It is our relationship with time and space and that is central to Bourgeois’s practice. His performances – staged within the narrative framework of his meticulously developed set designs and soundscapes – unsettle the equilibrium, but it is through this process of articulated spectacle that our humanity is brought to the fore.

Harry Styles ‘As It Was’

Harry Styles turned to Bourgeois to choreograph the music video for ‘As It Was,’ the first single from his third solo album, ‘Harry’s House.’ The video, directed by Ukrainian filmmaker Tanu Muino, features the pop artist dancing with Mathilde Lin on a rotating platform of Bourgeois’s design.

Tiffany & Co: Lock Collection

A symbolic reference to the collection’s spirit of togetherness and unity, shown beautifully in the recent campaign by photographers Mario Sorrenti and Raymond Meier and choreographer Yoann Bourgeois, the Tiffany Lock collection goes beyond what meets the eye. In fact, the padlock has played an integral role in Tiffany’s history. As a significant motif in the House’s archives, the padlock is part of Tiffany’s design DNA that dates back to the late 1800s. Today, the padlock is reinvented through the all-gender bracelets, becoming a sophisticated design detail that is also functional.

Yoann Bourgeois x Viktor & Rolf

Acclaimed theatrical director & choreographer Yoann Bourgeois collaborated with FKA Twigs and film director Andrew Thomas Huang on Viktor & Rolf’s new fragrance campaign “Good Fortune.”

Les Grands Fantômes / The Great Ghosts

When Bourgeois was invited by the Center des Monuments Nationaux to create a performance for the Panthéon in Paris, he chose the fight against gravity as his leitmotif. ‘The Mechanics of History – an attempt to approach a point of suspension’ became a dizzying performance that took place in the ridge of this historic dome.

‘The Great Ghosts’ is a cinematographic adaptation of this living exhibition in a breathtaking setting, co-realized with Louise Narboni. Fixed to the highest point of the Pantheon dome, Foucault’s famous pendulum provides the medium for a choreographic creation around movement and balance. Bourgeois uses a constellation of autonomous devices that amplify physical phenomena: trampolines, a turntable and his famous “seesaw of levity,” with which he defies gravity and balances between beauty and fear.

‘The Great Ghosts’ won Best Live Performance Capture at the San Francisco Dance Film Festival and Best Film at the Dance Screen initiated and organiZed by the IMZ International Music + Media Centre.

Ophélie

Conceived and directed by Bourgeois in close collaboration with Marie Bourgeois and co-produced with la Maison de la Danse, ‘Ophélie’ features Shakespeare’s tragic figure, Ophelia, a character whose drowning questions eternally.

In ‘Ophélie,’ Bourgeois makes a woman slowly whirl between two waters. In an approach inspired by the ruin of meaning to which Hamlet testifies, Bourgeois imagines a machinery made up of a bed, an aquarium, a crane and multiple links that interact by setting an inert body in motion. The device itself can be seen as a dream machine, an imaginary space. Half-phantom, she is the image of dissolution in a moment of suspended poetry.

Gap

Gap is one of the world’s most iconic apparel and accessories brands and the authority on American casual style. For the launch of the retailer’s new product category, Wearlight Denim, Gap partnered with Bourgeois, filmmaker Kim Gehrig, and advertising agency Yard NYC to create a mesmerizing campaign channeling the light and optimism of summertime through Bourgeois’s precisely orchestrated aerial choreography. Using a custom set with built-in trampolines, the performers effortlessly float, jump and flip, seemingly defying gravity.

Yard NYC also shot behind-the-scenes footage of the campaign, showcasing the complexity and creativity of the whole production. The amount of talent, coordination and effort to develop this campaign is evident as the cast practices bouncing off the trampolines and works with Bourgeois to perfect the movements. The Wearlight campaign was executed in camera with no special effects, demanding exceptional strength and talent from the performers.

Passants

With ‘Passants,’ a participatory variation of his play Fugue / Trampoline, Bourgeois makes us spectators to the drama and the beauty of life, the pain of the absence of meaning, and the mysterious joy of feeling that our lives, never isolated, are in the hands of a deeply good presence which loves us, carries us, lifts us up and invites us to live fully open and in wonder.

On the famous helical staircase, people walk, cross, appear and disappear through undetectable hatches in a continuous, infinite movement. From this striking vision of our humanity emerge flights of dancers in a profoundly poetic experience. Already, the wheel of fate is moving and we have no more control over it, now impossible to turn around without being drawn into a vortex of hell, also impossible to imagine a return to stillness. However, the performers show us without any anxiety that another equilibrium is possible, that happiness is in front of them.

The space is small, but takes on the dimension of a world, the instant takes the measure of a generation. Bourgeois’s shorter performance in the Panthéon, ‘The Mechanics of History,’ belongs to this longer version of the artist’s exploration of modern Sisyphean man.

Apple

To advertise its wireless AirPods, Apple and TBWA\Chiat\Day commissioned Bourgeois to choreograph a bespoke performance for a film directed by Oscar Hudson featuring one of Bourgeois’s high-flying protégés.

The 2 minute advertisement follows a young man as he gets ready to step outside in the morning. He forces himself to put on a happy face, grabs his AirPods, and asks Siri to play him something new. As the song begins to play, he discovers that the black-and-white environment is a bounce house, which helps him leap to unexpected heights. The whole city becomes a personal trampoline, allowing him to bounce around freely and effortlessly to the jazz-infused beats of the track.

The 2-minute film, shot over 12 days in Kiev, was created without the use of wires or a harness and required 200 artists and technicians. ‘Bounce’ captures the feeling of being untethered by transforming one man’s mundane commute to work into a musical, gravity-defying experience.

Requiem

In this interpretation of fragments of Mozart’s unfinished Requiem, Bourgeois explores the silences that are part of the unfinished score. On stage, between suspension and disappearance, eight acrobatic dancers give voice to the void left by Mozart’s untimely death. A collaboration between Bourgeois and Laurence Equilbey with her combined choral/orchestral forces of accentus and Insula, the performance at La Seine Musicale acted as the finale of the Festival Mozart Maximum.

For Bourgeois, it is the very incompleteness of the piece that is the inspiration. A shiny black curved surface dominates, towering above the stage, a reflecting black mirror. Many dancers scale it, only to slide down in a descent into Hell perhaps, or a descent back to this life, as the stage itself rotates in circles inspired by Foucault’s pendulum. The idea is to find a ‘window of eternity’ as the dancers frequently find themselves in suspension, playing with time, bringing us closer to an atemporal abyss.

Fugue / Trampoline

Accompanied by Philip Glass’s moody ‘Metamorphosis Two’ performed on either harp or piano, Bourgeois uses a nine-step staircase and a trampoline to resist and submit to gravity, creating a breathtaking, balletic spectacle in ‘Fugue / Trampoline.’

Beginning with a limp, careless-looking slump of his body onto the trampoline, Bourgeois’s body bounds back up to the wooden platform with the softest elegance. He repeats the exercise, embracing gravity with different strokes, hurtling, spinning or curling into a fall. When returning to the platform or a step, he always lands on his feet, more often than not regaining his vertical balance with a single foot, or just his toes.

I wonder where the dreams I don’t remember go

Streamed live from Nederlands Dans Theater’s Zuiderstrandtheater in front of a limited audience, ‘I wonder where the dreams I don’t remember go’ is a mesmerizing, meditative, awe-inspiring work about identity and personal relationships that uniquely captures the emotional and physical ups and downs of life during the age of quarantine.

The 40 minute work, set to a score by German-British composer and pianist Max Richter, is an entanglement of disciplines that connects choreography, dance, acrobatics and magic in an exploration of the constraints of one’s physical forces, counterbalanced by an indistinguishable precision and execution.

The goal for the dancers – a lifetime achievement for Bourgeois – was to reach his so-called ‘point of suspension:’ a zenith balance easy to figure out, difficult to perform. Bourgeois reminds us that human existence is impermanent, that people are by nature social animals who need to be among fellow beings, and that life, above all, is intrinsically beautiful and poetic.

Celui qui tombe / He Who Falls

‘Celui qui tombe’ features six performers on a platform suspended above the stage by cables. Lowered into a horizontal position, this structure begins to revolve, slowly at first, then faster. At first, the six are disengaged from one another but, as they become increasingly restricted in their movements, begin to interact as a group.

At moments, members of the group fracture off, only to realize that they cannot go it alone; at one point, the six appear increasingly discombobulated as Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ plays eerily in the distance. ‘Celui qui Tombe’ becomes, like many of Bourgeois’s performances, the universe – society as a whole – in a microcosm: the individual survives only if the group

Scala

In ‘Scala,’ Bourgeois draws a ballet in which the performers link the sequences together in a large continuous movement, like a domino cascade, defying fear and gravity. On stage, minimalist monochrome decor represents the interior of a house. Very quickly, the decor comes to life. Objects move, a frame falls for no reason, then the cabinet. In a Kafkaesque chain reaction, the chairs and table break down when you sit on them, and immediately reform. The paintings follow one another in astonishing fluidity.

In the middle of this possessed setting, seven clones silently roam the scenery in an endless choreography. The machine is started and will not be able to stop. Man manipulated must adapt constantly, stuck in a world beyond him, riddled with pitfalls, cogs, pulleys, gears, doors and turnstiles.

Like the elements of the decor, the bodies are disarticulated in a poetic and sometimes distressing atmosphere. Some characters are caught in the ground and disappear under the background, then magically reappear on the stage. Two trampolines arranged on each side of the titular staircase offer air passages of great poetry, all accompanied by the bewitching music of the British group Radiohead.

Little Song

For his debut with Nederlands Dans Theater, Bourgeois staged ‘Little Song,’ a farce in which a man and a woman move about a small wooden set that becomes a character unto itself while the Texas rock band Explosions in the Sky hovers behind them.

An expanded version of Fugue / Table, a piece in which imperceptibly navigates between physics and poetry, dance and acrobatics, in ‘Little Song’ the whole set starts to disintegrate – first the chairs break, then the table, the ladder falls apart and other bits of furniture collapse. A spotlight drops from above bouncing on the stage as another falls, sending sparks from its cable as it swings to and fro above the performers’ heads while the band is frozen and silent behind them. The piece ends in total chaos and ecstatic cheers from the audience.