BALLET JOGGING

" Ballet jogging is a participative performance which mixes performing arts and running. I started to think about this idea before the 2024 Paris Olympics. And I created the piece for the arrival of the Olympic flame in France via Marseille with the support of the Scène Nationale de Marseille, Le ZEF which is a very great theatre involved in all the popular territories of Marseille. My idea was very simple : I wanted to make people run in order to create choreographies inspired by collective motion and swarm intelligence. For example the murmurations of the birds in the sky and the movement of fishes in the sea. Instead of birds and fishes I wanted to do that with human beings.

In Ballet Jogging, the choreography becomes a kind of trajectory game which creates geometrics shapes like circles, squares, spirals, zig-zag, vortex. Participants can run forward and run backward. They can cross each others. They can sprint or they can do slow motion, they can freeze the race and start to run again… All of these movements of people are accompanied by an original electronic and melodic music played live, which creates sometimes meditative atmospheres or sometimes peaks of energy. A beautiful music composed by Julien Lepreux. We invited 150 amateur runners to create this performance. It was an incredible human experience with a lot emotions. Everybody who share this experience did a real physical performance like in a sport competition but a competition without winners or losers. Just a collective victory. And this gives a lot of philosophical meaning and intensity to this collective and united physical effort. People recover the joy, the pleasure and the freedom of just running. Like when we were kids. You known kids, they never walk they always run…"

Pierre Rigal about Ballet Jogging - professionnal presentation for Cratère Surfaces - July 2026