Italy’s brightest and most radiant dancing star meets the most obscure and controversial painter in art history. Roberto Bolle is Caravaggio in the two-act ballet of the same name by Roman choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti.

On various music by Claudio Monteverdi (The Orpheus, The Combat of Tancredi and Clorinda, The Coronation of Poppea and the Seventh Book of Madrigals), re-orchestrated symphonically by Bruno Moretti, who will also conduct the live performance by the Orchestra of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, the ballet Caravaggio features Teatro alla Scala’s very own étoile Roberto Bolle in the title role, engaged in a continuous swing between Darkness and Light. Here inner torments bind with artistic expression to develop solos, duets, trios and quartets interspersed with choral movements, thanks to an ensemble formed for the occasion.

Carlo Cerri’s sets and lighting connote the stage space, in which the choreography highlights the vibrations and tensions of the bodies that were inspired in Bigonzetti by several paintings by master Michelangelo Merisi but without ever conceding place to a mere iconographic reproduction of them. The costumes bear the signature of Lois Swandale and Kristopher Millar for this passionate and carnal immersion in Caravaggio’s Ego, masterfully rendered by Roberto Bolle, himself a living work of art who here deliberately plays on chiaroscuro contrasts, between the painter’s darkness and his own shining personality as a performer.