3/4

Maurice Ravel’s La Valse (1919–1920) is a masterpiece of paradox—elegant and frenzied, ecstatic and apocalyptic. Originally conceived in 1906 as Wien, a tribute to the Viennese waltz and Johann Strauss, the work evolved dramatically after World War I into something darker and more ambiguous. Ravel described La Valse as a “whirling, hallucinatory ecstasy.” It is often interpreted as a metaphor for a civilization spiraling toward collapse or as a "cry of anguish," as Manuel Rosenthal put it, echoing the composer's wartime service as an ambulance driver. Rejected by Diaghilev as "not a ballet," La Valse remains elusive as it evokes a doomed, decadent world dancing toward its end.

 

The interdisciplinary project 3/4, created by the Bose-Pastor Duo in collaboration with video artist Baptiste Leydecker and choreographer Julio Arozarena, reimagines La Valse through the gothic lens of Edgar Allan Poe. Inspired by Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” and The Masque of the Red Death, this version explores dualities—beauty and horror, control and chaos, grace and destruction—as both thematic and structural elements: opposing yet mutually-dependent forces that culminate in a unified effect. The four-hand piano arrangement by Lucien Garban underscores these tensions with its raw, interwoven physicality. A visceral collaboration between music and dance channels the urgency of a world on edge.

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Ravel called Poe his “greatest teacher in composition,” (New York Times, January 6, 1928) sharing a similar fascination with the macabre and methodical construction of emotional effect. 3/4 uses this connection to strip away nostalgic interpretations, presenting La Valse instead as a mirror of our own unstable era—an age of war, pandemics, political decay, and ecological collapse.

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“We are dancing on the edge of a volcano,” Ravel once wrote. La Valse makes us feel it—and 3/4 invites us to look at it unflinchingly, asking: are we dancing toward death, or transformation?