Bertrand d'At

Bertrand d'At was born in 1957 near Bordeaux and began his training in France at The Dijon Conservatory, then at Maurice Béjart's Mudra School Dance in Brussels. In 1978, he joined the Ballet du XX^e Siècle as a permanent dancer and performed in Le Sacre du printemps, Petrouchka, L'Oiseau de feu, Dichterliebe, La Flûte enchantée, Les Illuminations, Ière et Xème Symphonies, Wien, Wien nur du allein and Dionysos - for this last piece he was Maurice Béjart's assistant to the choregraphy. From 1984 to 1991, he was a ballet master for the Ballet du XX^e Siècle, and then for the Béjart Ballet Lausanne and was called to restage several of Béjart's works throughout the world.

In 1993, he shared the artistic direction of the Cullberg Ballet together with Carolyn Carlson and in 1996, he created his own group, Ballet Est, a company located in Champagne-Ardenne (France).

Bertrand d'At has been creating choreographies since 1984 for companies as diverse as Les Ballets du XX^e Siècle, Le Ballet de l'Opéra de Nantes, Le Béjart Ballet Lausanne, Les Nouveaux Ballet de Monte-Carlo, Le Ballet du Rhin and Ballet Est.

In 1997, Bertrand d'At was appointed as Dance Director of the Opéra national du Rhin and the Artistic Director of its ballet company, a National Choreographic Center and one of the most important French Ballet companies. Since his nomination, he brought in some of the most prominent choreographers including William Forsythe, Jiři Kylián, Hans van Manen or Lucinda Childs, and commissioned a great number of new works by younger choreographers, like Davide Bombana, Jacopo Godani or Jo Strømgren. His own works for his company include his personal versions of Romeo and Juliet (1991), Swan Lake (1998), Et in Arcadia ego (2001), the first performance in France of Britten's the Prince of the pagodas (2002), a new version of his ballet Dichterliebe (2003), D960 (2004) as wells as Le Chant de la terre to Gustav Mahler's music, for which he had the dancers and singers together on stage. For the younger audience, he staged a new production of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat (2007) to Ramuz libretto, Le métier de Mathis, a piece on the daily life of a company dancer, and he is currently working on a new version of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.

Bertrand d'At was also commissioned in 2006 by the Shanghaï Ballet for a new work, Sighs of love, freely inspired by Won Kar Wai's film In the mood for love (2006) and again in 2008 for Oiseaux exotiques, a series of short pieces set to piano music by Bach, Schumann and Mendelssohn.