"Swan Lake is, above all, a love story, a dream of love which maybe ends badly, but at least love finds its rightful place there. I wanted my Lake to be my own dream of love; I dreamed it as one dreams of love.” This romantic and iconic music, whose tunes we all know, becomes the basis for an investigation here into the interaction between personal and collective memory. A ritual work about repetition and eternal recurrence. Raimund Hoghe aims to makes us aware once more of what draws us together as human beings: he works on a form “which takes what is personal beyond the private, which prevents pure representation and pure denuding of the self”. Ornella Balestra, “Maurice Béjart's favourite ballerina who, in one movement of the shoulders, is able to resurrect the Swan that she has danced in the past”, the classically-trained Emmanuel Eggermont, Nabil Yahia-Aissa, who has danced for Boris Charmatz, and the young Belgian performer Lorenzo de Brabandere, dance alongside Raimund Hoghe to ward off the tragic destiny of love.

Source: programme de salle Maison de la Danse

Raimund Hoghe was born in Wuppertal and began his career by writing portraits of outsiders and celebrities for the German weekly newspaper "Die Zeit". These were later compiled in several books. From 1980 - 90 he worked as dramaturge for Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal which also became the subject matter for two more books. Since 1989 he has been working on his own theatre pieces for various dancers and actors. 1992 started his collaboration with the artist Luca Giacomo Schulte, who is till now his artistic collaborator. In 1994 he produced his first solo for himself, "Meinwärts", which together with the subsequent "Chambre séparée" (1997) and "Another Dream" (2000) made up a trilogy on the 20th century.
 Since 2002, Raimund Hoghe works also on group pieces : "Sarah, Vincent et moi" (2002), "Young People, Old Voices" (2002), "Tanzgescchichten" (2003), "Swan Lake,4 Acts" (2005), and the duo "Sacre - The Rite of the Sprin" (2004) with Lorenzo De Brabandere. He went back to the solo form in 2007 with "36, Avenue Georges Mandel" created in Seoul and presented during the Festival d'Avignon. Raimund Hoghe follows his cycle on classical and history of dance pieces with "Boléro Variations" in 2007 ( creation for the Centre Pompidou / Festival d'Automne in Paris) and the solo "L'Après-midi", for the dancer Emmanuel Eggermont, on Claude Debussy "Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune" and Gustav Mahler "Lieder" (creation in Festival Montpellier Danse 2008 /Théâtre du Hangar).

Hoghe frequently works for television on projects such as "Der Buckel", his 1997 hour-long self portrait for WDR (West German Radio and Television). His books have been translated into several languages and he has presented his performances all over Europe, as well as in Japan and Australia. He lives in Düsseldorf and has been awarded several prizes including the "Deutscher Produzentenpreis für Choreografie" in 2001, the French Prix de la Critique in 2006 for "Swan Lake, 4 Acts" (in the category "Best Foreign Piece"). Critics from the magazin ballet-tanz awarded him "Dancer of the Year" for 2008.

Source : Raimund Hoghe 's website

More information : raimundhoghe.com