We Loved Each Other So Much by Yoann Bourgeois and Solo Echo by Crystal Pite

The evolution of the GöteborgsOperans Danskompani under the direction of Katrín Hall over the past decade has been instrumental in defining the emerging Nordic contemporary dance movement. Gone was the Swedish company's dedication to repertory ballet with a shift towards innovation, enthusiastically embraced by its 38 dancers from more than 20 countries, and a catalogue of original works created by renowned international choreographers attracted by the company's vitality.


Their evening at the Festival de Otoño presents two faces that reflect this mutation, those of the Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and the French choreographer Yoann Bourgeois, two visions, one poetic and the other furious, that speak of the ductility of the GöteborgsOperans Danskompani.

In her first meeting with the GöteborgsOperans Danskompani, Crystal Pite offered them a revival of one of her best-known productions, Solo Echo, which she had premiered in 2012 for the Nederlands Dans Theater, where she is an associate choreographer. Inspired by Canadian poet Mark Strand's poem Lines for Winter, the winter landscape described in his melancholy verses is illuminated in Solo Echo with music from two movements of Brahms' sonatas for cello and piano, tracing an arc of time between adolescence and maturity, with its acceptances and losses, danced by seven performers who evolve through a series of subtle encounters against a backdrop of falling snow and swirling near-darkness.

As the critics wrote on the première of Solo Echo, "the dancers form a great organic knot, a sculpture in motion that actually echoes the sounds of all the individuals".

The 35-minute We Loved Each Other So Much, the new piece by French choreographer Yoan Bourgeois, who returns after four years to collaborate with the GöteborgsOperans Danskompani, for whom he created Huracán, Fugue/trampoline y Our music.

“You can sense a kind of love story, but I don't want it to be a tangible story," Bourgeois said in an interview shortly before the play's world première in Sweden in April. Bourgeois attributes her success to the influence of circus training on his career. His acrobatics and the incorporation of martial arts in We Loved Each Other So Much push the physical effort of the 16 dancers to the limit as they play out an accelerated process of movement that leads to a merciless war of bouncing and almost flying bodies. As Bourgeois notes, the artists proclaim their own aging and the concomitant loss of vigour, thereby engaging “in a kind of struggle against despair.”