This transposition of Beethoven’s work into choreography has no vision, goal or claim other than the music which carries and nurtures it, and is the only reason for its existence. Here, dance merely follows the slow progression of the composer who moves from anxiety to joy, from darkness to light.  This is not a question of a ballet, in the sense we know it, tacked onto a score which is one of the pinnacles of music, but of a profound human interest in a work which is part of mankind, and which here is not only played and sung, but danced, in the same way as greek tragedy, or any early collective religious event.

Source: Maurice Béjart

Maurice Béjart created the Ballet du XXe Siècle in Brussels in 1960, an international company that he directed and with which he toured around the world with, as his repertoire of creations grew: “Boléro” (1961), “Messe pour le temps présent” (1967) and “L'Oiseau de feu” (1970).
In 1987, the Ballet du XXe Siècle became the Béjart Ballet Lausanne. The great choreographer established himself in the Olympic capital. In 1992, he decided to limit the size of his company to around thirty dancers to "rediscover the essence of the performer” and, the same year, he founded the Rudra Béjart School-Workshop. Among the myriad of ballets created for this company, we can mention “Le Mandarin merveilleux”, “King Lear – Prospero”, “À propos de Shéhérazade”, “Le Presbytère...”, “MutationX”, “La Route de la soie”, “Le Manteau”, “Enfant-Roi” and “La Lumière des eaux et Lumière”.
 Director of theatre (“La Reine verte”, “Casta Diva”, “Cinq Nô modernes” and “A-6-Roc”) and opera (“Salomé”, “La Traviata” and “Don Giovanni”), filmmaker (“Bhakti”, “Paradoxe sur le comédien...”), Maurice Béjart also published several books (novels, memoirs, diaries, theatre plays). In 2007, just when he turned eighty, the choreographer created “La Vie du danseur racontée par Zig et Puce”. Maurice Béjart went on to create “Le Tour du monde en 80 minutes”, his last work, and passed away in Lausanne on 22 November 2007.

Source : Maison de la Danse show program

More information : bejart.ch

Gaumont Pathé Archives was set up after the catalogues of  Cinémathèque Gaumont and Pathé Archives were combined in 2004. This  venture is now the leading French image bank for black and white and  colour images illustrating the history of the 20th and 21st centuries.  The archive contains nearly 12,000 hours of footage including Pathé, Gaumont  and Eclair newsreels from 1908 to 1979, Sygma archives and the recently  acquired Soviet archives from the Arkeion catalog, and numerous  documentaries. 

Gaumont-Pathe Archives also conserves and showcases silent movies  from the combined catalogues of Gaumont and Pathé which contains over  2,000 titles. These include films by the founding fathers of French  cinema, from Leonce Perret and Albert Capellani to Ferdinand Zecca and Louis Feuillade. 

Source: Wikipédia

More information: http://www.gaumontpathearchives.com/