Born Maurice Jean Berger in Marseille, France, Béjart in his youth was an ardent student and appeared to be following the strict example set by his father Gaston Berger, a hard-working university administrator and educator who was largely self-taught. Béjart was so fanatical a student, in fact, that he had to be enrolled on doctor's orders at age fourteen at the ballet school of the Marseilles Opera for exercise to increase his physical vigor, a prescription that has worked wonders for over sixty years.
Young Maurice also exhibited his father's trait for independent action when he abandoned academic schooling after graduating from the Lycée de Marseille and the Faculty of Philosophy in Aix-en-Provence in 1945. Breaking free on many levels at eighteen, he left home for Paris where he studied ballet and soon dropped "Berger" to adopt the maiden name of Moliere's wife.
Central to his reinvigoration of classical ballet has been his creation of palpably homoerotic dances that celebrate male beauty. Symphonie pour un homme seul (1955, with a score by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry), featuring the first electronic score to accompany ballet, established Béjart as an innovator with a radical vision.
he danced and choreographed for the Royal Swedish Ballet and the Ballets de l'Étoile before forming his own company in 1957. After presenting an electrifying interpretation of The Rite of Spring (set to the classic Igor Stravinsky score) informed by myth, sexual heat, and stage flash in 1959 at the Théâtre Royale de la Monnaie in Brussels, he founded The Ballet of the Twentieth Century, a company that has had a major influence on the European Dance Theatre movement.
Based in Brussels until 1987, Béjart developed his ideas of ballet as total theater to explore the complex forces buffeting the individual in contemporary society. His highly theatrical and often shocking productions, some on such a grand scale that they had to be staged in stadium-size arenas, have attracted new, youthful audiences in unprecedented numbers. Béjart has said,
"Choreography, like love, is made by couples. Since I began I've been perpetually creating the same ballet, journal of friendships, my loves, my discovery of the universe."
Nijinsky: Clown of God (1971, set to a score combining music by Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky and Pierre Henry), a dreamlike meditation on Vaslav Nijinsky and his legacy, is only one prominent example of Béjart's personal identification and connection with his choreographic subjects.
Many times that connection, as in Nijinsky: Clown of God, has been palpably homoerotic. In addition to reimagining Ballets Russes classics such as The Firebird (to the original Stravinsky score), Petrouchka (to the Stravinsky score) and The Specter of the Rose (to a score of a piano piece by Carl Maria von Weber, orchestrated by Hector Berlioz) to spectacular effect, he has also derived inspiration from such gay icons as Prometheus, Dionysus, Orpheus, and Saint Sebastian.
Collaborating closely with many extraordinarily handsome men (Argentine Jorge Donn and Italian Paolo Bortoluzzi among them), Béjart has consistently created dances celebrating male beauty and eroticism, not the least of which is the all-male variant of his Bolero (1960, to the throbbing score by Maurice Ravel).
By refusing to regard any aspect of life as profane, he celebrates the carnal without apology; his work, ever theatrical, can carry an unambiguously sexual charge that some congregations would protest loudly. Many of his themes are academic, cultural, or biographical in content; he has been influenced by mysticism, and East Asian influences can be detected throughout his dances. His expressionist style incorporates jazz and avant-garde music, nontraditional dance forms, e.g., acrobatics, and unusual settings.
From his current base in Lausanne, Switzerland, Béjart could rest on his laurels and receive homages from his own spiritual heirs in the European Dance Theater movement (Pina Bausch, Boris Eifman, and Matthew Bourne, among others). Instead, he remains prolific and fully capable of stirring controversy.
Audiences and critics are either enthralled or enraged by recent offerings such as the celebratory Ballet for Life (1997, set to a score combining classical Mozart with pop-rock Queen), in response to the AIDS-related deaths of his friends Jorge Donn and Freddy Mercury of the rock group Queen; and Bolero for Gianni (1999, set to his all-time-favorite Ravel score), a tribute to the murdered Gianni Versace, who had designed the eye-popping costumes for that 1997 dance.
Such projects, as well as his many collaborations across classical and popular lines, have permitted Béjart not only to present his work to large theater audiences but also to record a remarkable number of performances on film and video for wider accessibility.
