2026 Seoul Ballet Extravaganza: What to Expect from Béjart Ballet and Chung Hyung-il’s Mondrian

Translation result

In a year unusually rich in ballet offerings, two productions open in the final week of April 2026. 

Bejart Ballet Lausanne (Béjart Ballet Lausanne, hereafter BBL) returns to Seoul after 25 years with “Bejart Ballet Lausanne with Kim Ki-min” (April 23–26 at the GS Art Center), while Chung Hyung-il Ballet Creative presents “Mondrian” (April 23–24 at the LG Arts Center Signature Hall).

BBL’s Korea performances feature world-renowned Korean dancer Kim Ki-min. Chung Hyung-il’s “Mondrian” includes rising talent Yeom Da-yeon, who won second place (Prize Winner) and the Audience Favorite award at this year’s 54th Prix de Lausanne. Together, the programs offer a clear view of South Korea’s ballet today—rooted in classical technique and reaching into contemporary experiment. 

“Bejart Ballet Lausanne with Kim Ki-min” marks BBL’s first return to Korea after 15 years since a 2011 engagement in Daejeon and its first Seoul appearance in 25 years. The company was founded by choreographer Maurice Béjart (d. 2007). 

For this tour, BBL assembled a program of signature works: Boléro and The Firebird, the Asian premiere of Hamlet, Bye Bye Baby Blackbird, and the Korean premiere of La Luna.

The tour is presented in two programs framed around The Firebird—a Stravinsky score that symbolizes revolution and rebirth and is here rendered in an abstract dance vocabulary—and Boléro, built on Ravel’s relentlessly propulsive score.

Program A (April 23, 25) pairs The Firebird with Boléro and adds Hamlet, which choreographer Valentina Turku reimagines with a contemporary sensibility that reframes Shakespeare’s tragic narrative. 

Program B (April 25, 26) features Bye Bye Baby Blackbird, in which choreographer Joost Brauwenraets teases a poetic resonance from Johnny Cash’s music, and La Luna, a solo Béjart created for Italian dancer Luciana Savignano.

Kim Ki-min, a principal with the Mariinsky Ballet, appears in Program A as La Mélodie in Boléro. The piece magnifies a simple, hypnotic melody into physical form: the lead dancer—literally elevated on a table—embodies the melody while the surrounding male corps shapes the driving rhythm, together releasing an almost volcanic energy.

As BBL artistic director Julien Favreau puts it, the work compresses emotion into repetitive yet continuously evolving movement, transforming the stage into a single, dynamic flow. He adds that its rhythmic power and emotional intensity create a kind of universal magic that reaches across ages and cultures.

Chung Hyung-il Ballet Creative’s “Mondrian,” led by choreographer Chung Hyung-il—who has expanded the scope of Korean contemporary ballet—stages the work of Dutch De Stijl master Piet Mondrian.

The piece translates Mondrian’s neo-plasticist abstraction—rectangles of primary color and strict vertical and horizontal lines—into contemporary ballet.

Set to music by Sergei Rachmaninoff, the production uses dance and media art to explore Mondrian’s inner fixation on grids and primary colors. 

“Ballet is an art forged through repetitive training and an obsessive pursuit of perfection,” Chung says. “Dancers rehearse the same steps hundreds or thousands of times until the movements are engraved in their bodies, yet onstage they must always renew those steps with vitality and spontaneity. That paradox felt very close to Mondrian’s relentless exactitude.”

“I treated Mondrian’s intersecting vertical and horizontal lines—the grid—as a psychological frame,” he continues. “Within that order, dancers compulsively assert their presence. The dancers’ bodies become the axes of that order, and the stage becomes a moving Mondrian canvas that shares themes of obsessive beauty and devotion with the audience.”

The production converts the canvas’s geometric lines, planes and colors into living energy through the dancers’ lines and movement. It features Yeom Da-yeon, who earned recognition at the Lausanne competition this year and has since joined Boston Ballet as a full-time company dancer.

Reporter Heo Mi-seon hurlkie@viva2080.com