✦ Who He Is ✦
Alexander Ekman was born in Stockholm in 1984 and trained at the Royal Swedish Ballet School. He danced professionally with the Royal Swedish Opera's ballet company before joining Nederlands Dans Theater 2 in 2002, and later Cullberg Ballet, before setting dancing aside at 21 to choreograph full time. His choreographic breakthrough came quickly: Flockwork, made for NDT 2 in 2006, announced an original, image-driven sensibility, and Cacti, created for the same junior company in 2010, turned him into one of contemporary dance's most talked-about young voices almost overnight.
Where much of the repertory profiled on this site trades in grief, violence, or existential weight, Ekman works in a different register entirely: large-scale, visually spectacular pieces built around a single vivid conceit - a flooded stage, a field of potted cacti, a barnyard of dancers playing cows - deployed with a showman's sense of scale and a comedian's sense of timing. He frequently designs his own sets and sound, and collaborates closely with composer Mikael Karlsson and designer Henrik Vibskov, giving his productions a tightly unified, art-directed look that owes as much to installation art and theatre as to concert dance.
Signature Works
Cacti (2010)
A satirical send-up of contemporary dance and the language used to review it, made for NDT 2, with dancers manipulating potted cacti atop giant Scrabble-like tiles while an onstage string quartet speaks pointed, critic-flavored commentary. Read the full profile →
A Swan Lake (2014)
A full-length reimagining made for Norwegian National Ballet that floods the stage with thousands of liters of shallow water, replacing the traditional lake with a literal one the dancers move through.
A Midsummer Night's Dream (2015)
Created for Royal Swedish Ballet and later broadcast on Swedish and French television, this evening-length work pairs Ekman's theatrical staging instincts with a folk-inflected score and a cake-strewn, celebratory second act.
PLAY (2017)
A full-evening commission for Paris Opera Ballet exploring childhood, games, and the impulse toward playfulness itself, performed to sold-out houses and among the company's more unconventional recent commissions.
Style & Method
Ekman typically builds a piece outward from one large, literal image or object - water, cacti, oversized props, a game - rather than from a movement vocabulary in the way many concert-dance choreographers do, and he treats stagecraft, sound, and design as equal partners to the choreography rather than as backdrop to it. His ensembles are drilled to a high degree of unison and precision, but that precision is consistently placed in service of a joke, a spectacle, or a pointed observation about how audiences and critics consume dance, rather than treated as an end in itself. The result sits closer to large-scale theatre or performance art than to the more introspective, release-based work that dominates much of the contemporary field.
Legacy
Ekman's works have entered the repertory of major companies well beyond their originating houses - Cacti alone has been staged by companies including Pacific Northwest Ballet, Boston Ballet, and Sydney Dance Company - a rare degree of international circulation for a piece built as an inside joke about the dance world. He remains a frequent collaborator with Royal Swedish Ballet and continues to create large-scale, design-driven work for companies across Europe and North America, and in 2024 he served as stage and choreography director for the opening ceremony of the Paris Paralympic Games, a mainstream extension of the same instinct for spectacle that runs through his stage work.
More than any other choreographer profiled on this site, Ekman has made humor and self-aware theatricality a viable, prestigious mode within contemporary ballet, opening space for a generation of companies to program work that is unmistakably serious in its craftsmanship while refusing to take itself too seriously.