Real
Love

The first time I saw Béjart Ballet live, I was a teenager in Athens — standing inside the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, a theatre built 2,500 years ago, watching Maurice Béjart's company perform in Versace costumes under the open Athenian sky. That night stayed with me. To be commissioned to create costumes for this legendary company — one of the most important in the history of contemporary ballet — was an honour that carried the full weight of that experience.

The inspiration came from an unlikely and deeply unsettling source: the World Press Photo of the Year 2018. An image of a man engulfed in flames during demonstrations. A photograph of such raw, visceral non-humanity that it forced me to pause. It became the entry point for a wider reflection on what we are losing: our capacity for genuine feeling in an age of click-bait, algorithmic distraction and artificial intelligence. Technology, like most human inventions, holds extraordinary promise — and catastrophic potential if misused.

The palette translates fire into costume: deep oxblood, saturated fuchsia, coral, orange. Each dancer a different body temperature, all in the same burn. The feathered back detail on top of an industrial thick zipper operated as a trompe l'oeil effect. From a distance the dancer appears to be on fire, the plumage reading as burning flames in motion. Not a simple decoration — just a reminder of a metaphor that defined the whole choreographic concept.