Ballet Noir

Ballet Noir is Mary-Jane O’Reilly’s uber elegant, film-noir rendition of Giselle Act 2 at Q Theatre.

Fluidly straddling the worlds of classical ballet, contemporary dance and more recently, neo-burlesque in her hit Edinburgh Fringe Festival work In Flagrante, Mary-Jane O’Reilly is a shape-shifter in the language and story of dance in New Zealand. Her only rule is it must exhilarate. Drawing on Mary-Jane’s gift for sizzle and polish, Ballet Noir is a fiendishly clever contemporary ballet work that channels the tragi-romantic narrative of the great ballets through the cryptic and edgy lens of 1940/50’s Film-Noir, with all its greyscale tension and stylish vainglory.

A meditation on the mysterious forces of darkness, characters include jaded femmes fatales, a young innocent abroad and two friends out for a night on the town, who, by chance, get trapped in the Ice Queen and her Cynic’s night of vengeance.

Featuring fifteen of Auckland’s finest dancers, the performance is an exquisite blend of dance, music, filmic imagery and the sensation of smell, with featured perfumes adding a unique experiential layer to the performance. Wearing sharply tailored authentic vintage jackets, skirts and hats, the dancers inhabit a world of secret rituals, rivalries and power struggles, where salvation only comes with a broken heart.

Duration: 80 mins including a 20 min interval.

On: 27 -29 October 2023.