La Chambre d'amour

First written in the year 2000, La Chambre d’amour is the first ballet choreographer Thierry Malandain envisioned upon his arrival in Biarritz, and the only one directly inspired by the Basque Country. This ballet brings together, in an original narrative, the great myths of love where heroes cross paths in a world where the ocean and the stars become one.

Maurice Ravel’s Une barque sur l’océan is interwoven with a contemporary, tailor-made score by Peio Çabalette. Two Basque composers thus accompany this ballet, conceived as a powerful cry of love—first and foremost for the Basque Country, a land of welcome and creation, and for Thierry Malandain’s performers, both past and present. It is also a profound cry of love for the audience and for the world, reminding us that we are, above all, beings made to love.

In September 2025, Thierry Malandain will once again create La Chambre d’amour, a ballet that has never ceased to accompany him. In doing so, he opens a reflection on the concept of repertoire and the transmission of works across generations.

« La Chambre d’amour, sung of in legend, is a grotto on the Basque coast that the tides once flooded at high water, and since the 18th century, the setting of a romantic tragedy. The story names them Ura and Ederra (Water and Beauty), and it was at the very moment when they were most fully savoring life that the Ocean—with its caresses and its threats, its calms and its furies—engulfed them.

By morning, their bodies, still entwined on the sand, added a new page to the universal literature of lovers whose ideal of love is shattered by fate: Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Desdemona, Orpheus and Eurydice… our Chambre d’amour evokes them. »

Thierry Malandain