Review: AFANADOR at Châtelet

After the huge success of La Cage aux Folles, which is going to transfer to La Seine Musicale in the fall, ballet is back at Châtelet, but in a very musical-theater way!

There are evenings in the theater when you feel you are witnessing something genuinely new — a work that could not have existed before its particular confluence of artists, obsessions, and traditions. Afanador, on the stage of the Théâtre du Châtelet from 27 March to 2 April 2026, is precisely that kind of event. The Ballet Nacional de España has brought to Paris a production of ravishing strangeness and formal intelligence, one that has swept the Spanish performing arts awards circuit and now arrives in the French capital trailing a wake of deserved rapture.

The show was born in the creative imagination of Marcos Morau, the Valencian choreographer who has led his Barcelona-based company La Veronal since 2005. Born in the town of Ontinyent in 1982, Morau trained between Barcelona and New York in photography, movement, and theatre, and went on to win Spain's National Dance Award in 2013 — the youngest recipient in the prize's history — before being named a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2023. That dual formation — equal parts image-maker and choreographer — is the very engine of Afanador.

Since 2004 Morau has directed La Veronal, now one of the most prominent dance companies on the European scene. His work builds, as he himself has described it, imaginary worlds in which movement, image, text, music and space combine into a single universe. He has been invited to make work for the Nederlands Dans Theater, the Lyon Opera Ballet, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, the Royal Danish Ballet, and the Royal Ballet of Flanders, among many others. Afanador is the fruit of his long-standing partnership with the Ballet Nacional de España — a pairing of the country’s most adventurous contemporary dance mind with its most prestigious national company.

The spark came from two photobooks. Colombian photographer Ruvén Afanador — born in the sixteenth-century city of Bucaramanga, Colombia — settled in New York after a formative period in Milan and went on to shoot for Vogue, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and countless other publications. Afanador had immersed himself in the world of flamenco in two books — Ángel gitano (2009), devoted to the men of flamenco, and Mil besos (2014), a companion volume celebrating the women — and created the poster for the 2008 Flamenco Biennial. Morau, himself the grandson of a photographer, encountered these books and was transfixed. He has written that Afanador’s Andalusian photo sessions were unrepeatable: the alchemy between the photographer and flamenco legends including Israel Galván, Matilde Coral, Eva Yerbabuena, and Rubén Olmo himself could never be reproduced. Rather than attempting to copy them, he resolved to begin where they ended.

The Ballet Nacional de España, directed by Rubén Olmo since September 2019, is the public company at the heart of Spanish dance since its founding in 1978 under the name Ballet Nacional Español, with Antonio Gades as its first director. Olmo discovered his love of dance early: he entered the Conservatorio de Sevilla at the age of nine and graduated with degrees in Spanish Dance and Classical Dance in 1996. A distinguished performer who danced with Javier Barón’s company before joining the BNE itself, he founded his own company in 2006 and has brought to the directorship a restless curiosity about what Spanish dance can become. The company’s mission is twofold: preserving the repertoire of traditional folk and academic dance while simultaneously creating new work; its dancers are trained not only in classical technique but also in bolero and flamenco.

The ninety-minute performance, which had its world premiere on 1 December 2023 at the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville, features 33 dancers from the company. The creative team assembled around Morau is exceptional. Dramaturgy comes from Roberto Fratini, whose structural thinking gives the work its philosophical coherence without ever tying it to a single narrative. The set design by Max Glaenzel is deliberately minimal, but Bernat Jansà’s lighting turns that empty space into an extraordinary play of black and white — zones of visual depth that do not impose but suggest, in a clean, almost ceremonial environment. The costumes by Silvia Delagneau work in that same register: all the imagery and accessories are present — the shawl, the fan, the castanets, the bata de cola — but redistributed according to the codes of a queer flamenco, with men and women exchanging their wardrobes. Juan Cristóbal Saavedra’s original score, with music for the mineras and seguiriyas composed by Enrique and Jonathan Bermúdez and lyrics by Gabriel de la Tomasa, creates what critics have described as an overwhelming sonic atmosphere that sustains the emotional pulse of the work throughout.

The audiovisual design by Marc Salicrú, incorporating Afanador’s photographs directly into the staging, is used with great restraint — photography and dance facing each other across a shared question about impermanence and desire. As Morau has articulated it, both arts share the same carnal challenge: to capture life, which by definition refuses to be captured.

Since its Seville premiere, Afanador has accumulated nine prizes between 2024 and 2025, including five Max Awards from the SGAE, two Talía Awards from the Academia de las Artes Escénicas de España, the Catalan Critics’ Prize, and a Godot Award for Best Choreography in Spanish Dance and Flamenco. It played to more than 10,000 spectators over eleven performances in Madrid’s Teatro de la Zarzuela, toured to Bruges, Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu, Cannes, Grenoble, and Aix-en-Provence, and now takes up residence at the Châtelet — entirely fittingly for a production whose aesthetic sensibility carries strong affinities with the French tradition of dance-theater and surrealism.

The Châtelet itself, with its long championship of dance that speaks across genre boundaries, is the ideal home. The venue has consistently brought to Paris the work that refuses easy category — and Afanador, which is simultaneously a flamenco spectacle, a contemporary dance work, a meditation on photography, and a meditation on desire, fits that curatorial vision exactly. Pre-show talks at the Salon Diaghilev on Tuesdays and Thursdays, led by dance critic Rosita Boisseau, offer further context for those who wish to go deeper into this remarkable convergence of traditions.

Afanador is, in the end, a work about what happens at the edge of recognition — when something familiar becomes strange, when a shawl is worn by the wrong body, when a photograph dissolves into movement, when flamenco passes through a surrealist lens and comes out transfigured. That it has done all this while remaining genuinely thrilling to watch, technically breathtaking in performance, and emotionally generous to its audience, is the measure of what Marcos Morau, Rubén Olmo, and the full company of the Ballet Nacional de España have achieved. Next on the agenda is a transfer of the musical Top Hat from the Chichester Festival — not to be missed.

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