Sergio Bernal’s Rodin: The Sculptor of Emotions opens MoraBanc Season in Andorra la Vella

The MoraBanc Season in Andorra la Vella opens Thursday with the Sergio Bernal Dance Company presenting Rodin: The Sculptor of Emotions, a four-part evening that reimagines several of Auguste Rodin’s best-known works. The piece, created on commission from the Peralada Festival, combines sculpture, music and movement to build a concentrated visual and choreographic world.

This is Bernal’s first time performing in Andorra; he says he visited the country as a child but has no memory of it and is eager to return with his company. Bernal, a former member of the Ballet Nacional de España who launched his own company in January 2020, frames the work around emotion: dance as a language that must convey feeling rather than merely display styles or steps. “Emotion is what separates movements from art,” he has said.

The evening is structured in four parts. The opening tableau examines Rodin’s life and his fraught creative relationship with Camille Claudel, portraying the young Rodin, his bond with Claudel and the torment and resentment that marked their collaboration. Bernal stresses Claudel’s role as a major artisan and artist whose hand contributed to much of Rodin’s work while also noting the difficult dynamics between them.

The second section draws on Rodin’s Torso of the Falling Man and the figure of Louis XIV, channeling majesty through baroque sonorities. Music by Jean-Baptiste Lully and performances associated with Jordi Savall underpin a choreographic language close to Spanish dance traditions, including escuela bolera and baroque-inflected forms.

The third vignette interprets The Kiss. Bernal performs the duet with Aída Badía of the Compañía Nacional de Danza; the section was created with the help of Valentino Zuccethhi, cited as a dancer and choreographer from the Royal Ballet. The choreography meets a dual musical palate — Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess and Max Richter’s I Will Not Forget You — aiming to recreate the sculpture’s aesthetic while evoking the innocence and emotional charge of two young people discovering a first kiss.

The programme closes with The Thinker, the section Bernal identifies as closest to him emotionally. He treats the figure as a body full of thoughts, insecurities, fears, sadness, joy and strength — elements Rodin sought to render through musculature and pose. For this tableau Bernal turns to Spanish dance and flamenco’s forceful, introspective vocabulary, with a soundtrack that includes music by Roque Baños, to convey the internal rumination of the figure.

Bernal traces the project to a long-standing fascination with sculpture and architecture: a book about Rodin gifted to him years ago left a lasting impression and inspired the idea of a dance piece around the sculptor’s work. Rodin: The Sculptor of Emotions presents those sculptural lines and tensions through bodies, music and choreography, asking audiences to feel the emotions the artist encoded in stone. The performance is staged at the Centre de Congressos as part of the MoraBanc Season.