Image: FLIP Publicity

Making their Toronto debut is Russia’s most exciting ballet company, Eifman Ballet St. Petersburg, with their latest masterpiece, Rodin, a new ballet inspired by the remarkable life and art of French sculptor Auguste Rodin.

Rodin is dedicated to the life and creative work of the great sculptor and his apprentice, lover and muse, Camille Claudel. For 15 years Rodin and Claudel worked together quite closely. After their break up, Claudel’s mental health deteriorated. She eventually spent 30 years in a mental hospital.

Visionary choreographer Boris Eifman has created a contemporary performance where dance and sculpture come together and find an unprecedented camaraderie in a modern ballet of love, lust and jealousy. Using the versality of body language, Eifman presents the world of human passions that Rodin and Claudel achieved through their works. A ballet where the dancers literally turn into the sculptor’s material, Rodin is a tale of artistic innovation and the price of genius that comes with it.

To turn a moment, frozen in stone, into an irrepressible stream of sensuous body movements; to capture the human spirit as brilliantly as Rodin and Claudel did in bronze and stone, was Eifman’s intention in creating Rodin.