✦ Origins ✦
Jiří Kylián created Petite Mort for the Salzburg Festival, where it premiered on 23 August 1991 at the Großes Festspielhaus, commissioned to mark the bicentennial of Mozart's death. Rather than reaching for a familiar Mozart showpiece, Kylián set the work to the slow movements of two of the composer's best-known piano concertos - the Adagio of No. 23 in A major and the Andante of No. 21 in C major - stripping away the brilliance most audiences associate with Mozart in favor of something quieter and more exposed.
The title is a French euphemism for orgasm, and the staging makes that reference explicit through its central prop: six fencing foils, handled by six bare-chested men, set against six women in rigid, corseted rococo dresses mounted on wheeled frames that can be rolled, stepped out of, or left standing like empty armor at the edge of the stage.
What Makes It Distinct
Twelve dancers move through alternating solo, duet, and full-ensemble sections, barefoot and in skin-toned costumes that strip away period dress even as the wheeled rococo gowns remain on stage as objects. The foils function as both prop and metaphor throughout - fencing's combination of formal discipline, physical risk, and thrust-and-parry intimacy stands in for a courtship that reads as equal parts contest and vulnerability. Lighting designed with Joop Caboort, drawing on Caravaggio's chiaroscuro, isolates bodies against near-total darkness, heightening the sense of exposure at the piece's core.
Unlike narrative ballet, Petite Mort has no plot; its structure is built from the tension between rigid historical costume and frank, contemporary partnering, and between Mozart's formal elegance and choreography that treats stillness and silence as seriously as movement. That restraint - long unhurried adagios, extended holds, foils lowered rather than brandished - gives the work an intimacy unusual for a piece originally staged in a hall as vast as the Großes Festspielhaus.
Legacy
Petite Mort entered Nederlands Dans Theater's core repertory and has since been licensed to companies including American Ballet Theatre, English National Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, and the Australian Ballet, among many others - making it, by most accounts, the single most frequently staged work Kylián ever made and one of the most widely performed pieces of contemporary ballet repertory worldwide.
Its durability owes something to the same portability that defines other repertory staples on this site: built on classically trained bodies rather than a separate technique of its own, it can be staged convincingly by ballet companies with no other connection to Kylián's artistic lineage, while still carrying the theatrical, design-driven sensibility he spent his NDT directorship developing.
See Also
Read the full profile of choreographer Jiří Kylián and of Nederlands Dans Theater, the company that premiered and continues to perform this work.