Additional Information
At Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, from October 29 to November 1, 2026, the Quebec choreographer Guillaume Côté will present a very personal vision of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It will rather be the Dreams, plural, that will be staged, in dance and, of course, in music. Because, did you know? Guillaume studied music, he has even been a composer in the past. Which, of course, allows him to approach choreographic creation, closely linked to music, in a completely original way. I met with Guillaume Côté to discuss more specifically the musical dimension of this creation, which will play an important role in the upcoming live performance.
PanM360: Hello Guillaume. First of all, and as a reminder, why “Dreams“, plural?
Guillaume Côté: I am kinda reclaiming the story, and I am interpreting it in a very personal way. I also wanted the freedom to explore love in all its facets, with contemporary themes, less heteronormative. The difficulty (and the interest) of adapting a Shakespeare play into dance is to free oneself from the weight of words and precise details, the subtleties of language.
PanM360: You studied music, particularly composition. Have you ever hesitated between music and dance?
Guillaume Côté: I wouldn’t say. But yes, I have written works for a choreographer named Dominique Dumais. We worked together at Alberta Ballet and Stuttgart Ballet. I even wrote a complete ballet in Florence at the Maggio Musicale. I did the entire score and choreography.
I also wrote a piano piece for a documentary broadcast on Radio-Canada/CBC, Dancing to my own music. Only two minutes, but hey, it’s me playing. The Maggio Musicale awarded me a prize, and I was called to create a complete musical evening, but by then, I had had enough. I continued to dance at the same time (I was a principal dancer at the National Ballet), and choreograph. It was too much to handle all at once.
PanM360: Composing, choreographing, dancing… These are indeed full-time jobs. Three of them!
Guillaume Côté: Indeed. I think it was easier for me to choreograph, I would say. So much so that dance took over. The job of a composer involves a lot of time alone. Today, software makes life easier, but 30 years ago, you had to write each score, do all the transcriptions, and transpositions for each instrument. A lot of work. With dance, I felt much more “in the world.”
And then, I think I’m not cut out to be a composer. I think I was good at dance, in the sense that I was good at finding atmospheres. I don’t think I was naturally gifted in music. I loved music. Even today. But the process was long for me, less intuitive. In choreography, it’s so much faster in my head. But, I have a lot of admiration for music, for composers.
PanM360: Out of simple curiosity, what kind of affinity do you have with contemporary composers or certain styles?
Guillaume Côté: I loved working with Kevin Lau, a Canadian with whom I collaborated in a program at the National Arts Centre called Encounters. Nicole Lisée was also present. We had some great ideas. I saw Clowns by Ana Sokolovic, another Montrealer. A fantastic creation. I also like Thomas Adès. I have always dreamed of doing something with his music. I love contemporary composers.
Right now, I am working on a big project that I can’t announce, but it’s with a contemporary composer and an opera. My first staging of an opera. But we can’t say more.
PanM360: Let’s return to the Dreams, then. Where does the spark that ignited the fire of this creation come from?
Guillaume Côté: It happened after my collaboration on Robert Lepage’s Hamlet. I suggested the Shakespeare play because it is quite atypical in its structure. Ivan Cavallari (Artistic Director of the Grands Ballets) wanted me to use the orchestra, so several ideas took shape. That said, when I started the process, I looked at several versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the music of Felix Mendelssohn, which had already been created with other choreographers, Ashton, Balanchine, Christopher Wilson. I found that there wasn’t as much freedom in the score as I was looking for, in the sense that I wanted to find things that would give me more freedom to use the themes of the dream and to create something more personal. After that, I started listening to a lot of Mendelssohn, and then naturally, I came across beautiful recordings by Yannick (Nézet-Séguin) with the European Chamber Orchestra, playing Mendelssohn’s symphonies.
PanM360: So there are excerpts from the symphonies…
Guillaume Côté: The music is almost entirely made up of Mendelssohn’s symphonies! About 75%. A lot of 4th (the Italian), 3rd as well (the Scottish).
PanM360: The most famous ones. And more than the Dream…
Guillaume Côté: From A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I only use the Wedding March for the wedding of Hermia and Demetrius. I actually do a mix. I use the pieces, and different movements, in the order I want, in order to support the narrative. What I want is to serve the story. I also use Johann Strauss (the Blue Danube) to end the first act, when the nectar of love falls on the assembly. We are then in something fabulous and very dreamy. I also found it interesting to transfer the codes of Shakespeare’s play to ballet. It’s a very rigid world, with many codes and prohibitions. But it is evolving. So, I wanted to translate that into the ballet. So, we start with Mendelssohn, the “traditional” classical, and as the show progresses, we hear more contemporary music. When we open the second act, we hear Max Richter with November, which transports us into a magical forest environment. When the lovers return, we go back to Mendelssohn, but then we move towards Satie, orchestrated by Debussy. It’s more fluid, more undulating.
PanM360: And there’s also the electro music of Montrealer Tommy Lunaire.
Guillaume Côté: Yes, I wanted to give him a chance. What he does is take sounds, transform them, and they become something completely different. For example, he takes sounds of crickets, frogs, forest sounds, all that, and then he remixes the whole thing. It creates something fabulous, strange, but at the same time, you feel there are references to nature, but you don’t feel them too explicitly either.
I found it super interesting to include that. At first, it was just to make transitions between the classical pieces. Eventually, it became the illustration of Titania and Oberon’s dream. He created an 11-minute piece that is all electronic. First of all, electro with electronic rhythm and rather contemporary things.
But it is also an announcement to tell us that, in the dream, we are in a very different musical universe. And then in this piece, there is the orchestra that is still underneath all of that, which will play with a click track. Everything was orchestrated by François Vallière, who is the orchestrator for the Grands Ballets. Then, once we reach the peak of chaos, the absurdity of the dream and everything, and it ends, the show concludes with the Adagio from Mendelssohn’s Third Symphony, which is absolutely fabulous. A return to the roots.
PanM360: These are not the works as they are usually played, and in addition, out of order, as well as a section with a click-track, like in cinema. It must be a challenge for the orchestra…
Guillaume Côté: Yes, it’s a challenge, but Dina (Gilbert, conductor), just yesterday, was here, and she said that these are all beautiful pieces, and that it gives the orchestra a lot of material to play iconic repertoire, but in an unusual way. Tommy’s music brings something unusual, of course, but he had a great instinct in maintaining very strong connections between his sounds and the themes of Mendelssohn’s universe. He could have plunged into a very dark, contemporary electro environment, but he had the sensitivity to maintain a dreamy, positive, fabulous atmosphere, which blends well with the orchestra. I think it adds a kind of instrument to the mix.
PanM360: An organic fusion between electro and the orchestra, like Apache with the Montreal Symphony.
Guillaume Côté: Exactly. I was there!
PanM360: You were a composer. What kind of vision, or perception of choreography, does that give you?
Guillaume Côté: As a choreographer, my ideal is to always work with new composers, but there isn’t always the budget. In a perfect world, there would always be a new composition with a new dance creation. When I did The Little Prince at the National Ballet, I chose a composer who had never created so much music in his life (Kevin Lau). Two hours of orchestral music, that’s fantastic. These are incredible opportunities.
I think I have a natural affinity for music, for the pacing of music, for orchestration, for the dynamics of the orchestra. I think in a very musical way. When I program the music, I tell myself that the musicians won’t like playing this, or that. Or, after that, they will kill me! It’s true that I look for a lot of things that are equally interesting in terms of music and dance. In a perfect world, both are equally indispensable to each other, like in Swan Lake. It is symbiotic.
PanM360: And music, in general, is often the source of an idea or a desire to choreograph something with it?
Guillaume Côté: Yes, often. At this moment, the music from The Rite of Spring (by Stravinsky) is stuck in my head. By the way, in Dreams, the piece November by Max Richter has also been tickling me for a long time. There, it will illustrate the Magic Forest. I thought to myself, yes, this is the right time to use it.
PanM360 : Thank you
