Don Quixote

In Don Quixote, I draw inspiration from the philosophical essence of Cervantes, which I approach through an abstract and sensitive reading. The aim is not to retell the story, but to make its energy resonate: the power of dreams, the desire to live differently, and the simultaneously absurd and sublime struggle against reality. In Cervantes’ work, the Knight of the Sad Countenance stands against a disenchanted world ruled by reason and irony, where ideals no longer have a place.

Across the plains of La Mancha, his journey is both geographical and inner: a spiritual crossing where each step in the dust blurs the boundary between illusion and truth. For me, this movement echoes the artist’s path—a constant back-and-forth between the world and the self, between reality and imagination.

It is often said that what Don Quixote truly battles, beyond windmills, are the invisible limits of his quest for justice and his irrepressible need to re-enchant the world. At the heart of this struggle burns an unreal, faceless love—both driving force and refuge of hope. In this figure, I recognise the artist, inhabited by visions, often alone in the face of the world’s incomprehension, yet always sustained by the necessity to create. Like Don Quixote, he persists in believing in beauty, poetry, and the power of gesture. This vital impulse, both fragile and obstinate, runs through the piece as a meditation on the artist’s condition: between lucidity and utopia, solitude and faith in art.

The work celebrates this stubborn refusal to give up believing, loving, and resisting reality—not out of naïveté or heroism, but out of necessity. Don Quixote is my third creation for Ballet Biarritz, but the first shaped by the awareness of my forthcoming responsibility as its director. This perspective brings a new intensity to a personal question: how does one continue to dream, to love, and to create when the weight of reality becomes more present? How can we keep alive the essential madness of art without losing its measure ?

Martin Harriague.

Succeeding Thierry Malandain, Martin Harriague will take over as director of CCN Ballet Biarritz from 1 January 2027. Since the announcement of his appointment in summer 2025, the company teams have been working hand in hand with both choreographers to prepare this new chapter.

This shared programme, The Sorcerer’s Love / Don Quixote, celebrates the encounter between the worlds of these two creators.

Two visions of a fantastical Spain respond to one another: one, sensual and elemental, rises from a land of dust and ashes; the other, luminous and unrestrained, takes flight on the winds of dreams.

In The Sorcerer’s Love, Thierry Malandain conjures the spectre of a love that refuses to die, trapped within its own passion. In this circle of life and black roses, traces of a spent fire, it is all of humanity that seeks release, between death and desire.

In Don Quixote, Martin Harriague follows a man who fights reality itself, guided by a faceless love and an unwavering faith in beauty. Beneath the knight’s madness lies the solitude of the artist, driven by the collective, irresistible necessity to believe, imagine, and create.

Two choreographic languages, two vital impulses, like two faces of a single inner Spain—mystical and burning. At the heart of both works burns the same certainty: the urge to love is irrepressible, and the courage to love, despite everything, remains the greatest of human gestures.

Production: CCN Malandain Ballet Biarritz.
Coproduction: Opéra de Saint-Étienne; Centro Danza Matadero – CDM; Scène nationale Théâtre d’Orléans; Teatro Victoria Eugenia de Donostia – San Sebastián / Ballet T; Centre Chorégraphique National / Malandain Ballet Biarritz.
Support: Carré des Mécènes of Malandain Ballet Biarritz; Association of Friends of Malandain Ballet Biarritz.

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