The GNO ballet is reprising its hugely successful production 3 ROOMS, in which GNO Ballet Director Konstantinos Rigos enters into creative discourse on contemporary movement vocabularies with two of the dance world’s leading lights – the great Czech choregrapher Jiří Kylián and the internationally acclaimed Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. This production is made possible by a grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) to enhance the GNO’s artistic outreach.

The Pedal Tone for a Child, a new choreography by Konstantinos Rigos set to music by GNO Artistic Director Giorgos Koumendakis, here encounters Jiří Kylián’s iconic Petite mort and Ohad Naharin’s celebrated Minus 16 in what is an opportunity for the dancers of the GNO Ballet to pit themselves against the particular performative challenges of these three works. Joining the dancers of the GNO Ballet on stage for the choreography by Rigos are student performers drawn from the GNO Professional Dance School.

GNO Ballet Director Konstantinos Rigos presents a new choreography for a piece by Giorgos Koumendakis, The Pedal Tone for a Child. The work, inspired by Byzantine music, concerns itself with discovering a world of nature and of tradition. This choreography by Rigos transports us into a dystopian and forsaken black-and-white world where an abandoned advertising billboard stands like a scarecrow on the far horizon.

The great Jiří Kylián, who served as Artistic Director of the Nederlands Dans Theater from 1975 to 1999, first presented this choreography in Salzburg to mark the bicentennial of Mozart’s death, setting the work to slow movements taken from two of Mozart’s most popular Piano Concertos – Nos. 21 and 23.

> Stage design of the production Petite mort was produced in parts in the workshops of the Sächsische Staatstheater – Semperoper Dresden.

Using music that ranges from Dean Martin to mambo, and from techno to traditional Israeli melodies, the current House Choreographer and former Artistic Director (1990 to 2019) of the renowned Batsheva Dance Company, Ohad Naharin, created Minus 16, a piece that eliminates the barrier between its dancers and the audience in unique and unpredictable ways.