BOLERO X – Shahar Binyamini

In one evening, on the Israeli Opera stage, 40 dancers and an orchestra meet to re-examine three canonical works that changed the face of music for dance in the 20th century:
The Rite of Spring | The Afternoon Rest of the Faun | Bolero.

Conductor: Roy Oppenheim | Composer: Ariel Blumenthal

A dramatic journey between ancient rituals and contemporary sound and movement, between sustained hypnosis and orchestral subtlety, between body and sound.

Part One

The dance work The Rite of Spring is regarded as a turning point in the history of dance — thanks to its wild, ritualistic theme and its groundbreaking movement language that shook the art world.

Choreographer Shahar Binyamini creates a new original piece that explores the connection between body and ritual.

The movement develops through polyrhythmic patterns, eruptive energy, and a mesmerizing physical language, forming a total stage experience of a contemporary ritual.

The work features an original new score by Ariel Blumenthal, composed for The Revolution Orchestra.

The orchestral music, written especially for this performance, seeks — like the choreography — new shades and colours, a surprising orchestral sound blending traditional (acoustic) instruments with electronic ones such as guitars, unique percussion, and synthesizers.

Performed by The House of Dance and the Revolution Orchestra.

Part Two

Afternoon of a Faun (1894) by Claude Debussy is considered a milestone in Western music—a moment where composition ceases to tell a story in the dramatic sense of Romanticism, and instead begins to unfold as a state of consciousness built from colour, movement, resonance, and memory.
Instead of a clear narrative structure, Debussy offers a musical image that moves like breath—rich in shades, suggestive, and open to personal interpretation.
The piece inspired Vaslav Nijinsky’s groundbreaking choreography for the Ballets Russes and became a symbol of aesthetic revolution in the dance world.
Here too, Shahar Binyamini creates a new choreographic layer, in collaboration with Blumenthal, who composed a new musical interpretation, performed live by The Revolution Orchestra.
The choreography evolves at the border between movement and dream.

Part Three

The evening concludes with Boléro by Maurice Ravel (1928).
Originally composed as a full ballet, its structure is almost scandalously simple: one rhythm and one melody, repeated again and again, with constant changes in orchestral colour and a gradual intensification that leads to a climax of ecstatic power.
It is one of the most iconic works in the world of dance—thanks to its hypnotic structure, the slow build-up of intensity, and the obsessive atmosphere it creates, growing moment by moment.

BOLERO X, created by Shahar Binyamini for 50 dancers, became an international sensation, performed on major stages across Germany, Canada, France, China, and beyond.
Now, for the first time in Israel, the piece will be performed with live orchestral accompaniment in a version that brings the depth, rhythm, and hypnotic repetition of Ravel’s score fully into the movement.