Van Cleef & Arpels Debuts A Dance Festival In Hong Kong This May

In 1920’s Paris, Louis Arpels, one of the early founders of luxury jeweler Van Cleef & Arpels and a ballet enthusiast, used to bring his nephew Claude to the Opera Garnier, a stone’s throw away from the boutique in Place Vendôme. By 1941, his idea for the Maison’s first ballerina clips saw the light of day, and soon became one of its signatures. Thereafter, Claude Arpels’ friendship with celebrated choreographer George Balanchine, co-founder of the New York City Ballet, resulted in the ballet Jewels, which premiered in New York in 1967. This set the stage for the brand’s collaboration decades later with Benjamin Millepied, who conceived the trilogy Gems and the ballet Romeo and Juliet. Further testifying to the House’s shared history with the world of dance, it has established ties since 2007 with renowned institutions such as the Royal Opera House in London, the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, the Australian Ballet and the Croisements Festival in China, and unveiled the Fedora Prize for Ballet in 2015, which rewards excellence and inventiveness in choreographic creation.

A new chapter in Van Cleef & Arpels’ connection with dance opened in 2020 with the introduction of its Dance Reflections program that supports artists and institutions showcasing the modern and contemporary choreographic repertoire, while encouraging new productions, guided by values of creation, transmission and education. Backing numerous choreographers and companies for their new creations and the presentation of dance performances globally, the initiative includes an annual dance festival. After a first edition in London last year, it’s now coming to Hong Kong from May 5 to 21, 2023 in partnership with the French May arts festival. Featuring seven international artists, the line-up includes Gisèle Vienne’s Crowd drawing equal inspiration from music, cinema and dance, Ola Maciejewska’s show exploring her research into Loie Fuller’s famous Serpentine Dance from 1892, Alessandro Sciarroni’s investigation of an Italian folk dance, Christian Rizzo’s collaboration with Turkish dancer Kerem Gelebek on melancholy and exile, Passages by Noé Soulier and Rachid Ouramdane’s Les Traceurs gathering aerial artists and adventurous athletes. Nicolas Bos, President and CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels, details the Maison’s century-old links with the universe of dance and the plans for its Dance Reflections program.

Tell me about Van Cleef & Arpels’ initial link with the world of dance in the 1920s when Louis Arpels took his nephew Claude to the Opera Garnier.

It started as the personal taste and passion of the family that you mentioned. I think that it was really something that was important in Paris and in Europe at the time, and they were avid visitors to the Opera House and amateurs of ballet. Very quickly, dance also integrated the inspirations that they would bring to the Maison. So I think it was not only their personal taste disconnected from the jewelry house that they were developing at the time, but it was also an expression of certain values that were really forming at the time what would become the style of Van Cleef & Arpels – the celebration of movement and the lightness that you find in nature – and this is why flowers, butterflies or birds have been so important in the representation of nature, as Van Cleef & Arpels started to develop it. But ballet and dance also provided another aspect that would progressively be incorporated, and this is how ballerina brooches, or the representation of dancers in a very figurative way, appeared in the ’40s, mostly on minaudières or brooches, and then in our necklaces and so on. But also in a more abstract and sometimes subliminal manner – you can really see that in certain treatments of movement in certain abstract shapes.

Tell me about Claude Arpels’ meeting in the 1960s with George Balanchine and their shared passion for precious stones that led to the creation of Jewels.

Claude Arpels was at the time one of the Arpels brothers running Van Cleef & Arpels in the United States. As he was also in that family tradition of taste for dance and ballet, he became quite good friends with George Balanchine, who was at the time running the New York City Ballet. That was in the late ’50s, early ’60s. And from their relationship came the idea of creating a ballet that would have an abstract inspiration. A lot of the ballets at the time, classical, obviously, but also neoclassical, were still based on stories. If you think of Swan Lake or Giselle, you would take a fairy tale or a story, and then create a ballet to follow the story. Here, the idea was to create something that was an abstract ballet that was inspired by precious stones. What I heard from some of the family members was that Claude Arpels had a dream of stones dancing on set that he shared with Balanchine. Balanchine created a three-act ballet in 1967 that was very emblematic of that period. The first act is Emeralds, the second is Rubies and the third is Diamonds. It’s interesting from our perspective because it’s trying on stage to recapture the feelings and emotions associated with these different stones. In the history of the connection between Van Cleef & Arpels and dance, it’s a very important moment.

What made you start to support ballet companies in 2000?

I really believe that these stories of inspirations should be a two-way conversation and relationship, so it’s not just about taking inspiration from one world or one discipline, but it’s also trying to support new productions. That’s something that existed in the past that we tried to revive. The first obvious connection with the world of dance was classical ballet, so an obvious way to reconnect with that world was to work with the Opera Garnier here, the Bolshoi or the Royal Opera House, places that were really the ambassadors of classical ballet, the patrimony, but also some new productions. Sometimes it was very simple support, sometimes it was like what we did in 2007 with the Royal Opera House, which was a more comprehensive project. We brought our craftsmen and designers to the studio and the rehearsal meeting with the dancers. The stage designer and some of the dancers came here also to talk with our stone experts and craftsmen to understand actually what could have been in Balanchine’s mind when he was looking at these stones. For us, it’s kind of obvious, but for most dancers, of course they had never seen a large ruby or emerald in their life, so it was interesting for them to talk with our experts. Then as the years passed, we were lucky to be able to continue to support some institutions and also more directly some dance companies like Benjamin Millepied, to support some creation projects like what we do through the Fedora Prize for Ballet and then in the last few years, through Dance Reflections, to really directly support programs and diffusion across the world.

Why do you wish to reach new audiences who may be less familiar with dance?

We create rather rare and expensive pieces that are not necessarily affordable for everyone. But it doesn’t mean that we feel that all dialog should be restricted to small audiences, and this is what we’ve tried to develop in everything we do around the world of jewelry. L’École, School of Jewelry Arts was created for that, to give access, not necessarily to jewelry as a commercial category, which, by nature, will always remain a bit exclusive because it’s quite expensive the way we do it, but to give access to jewelry as a cultural discipline to the widest audience because we feel there is something very interesting and rich in that field that could be shared by many people. It’s the same really for dance, and in particular contemporary dance. I think in some contexts, in some countries, it’s an activity or discipline that’s understood and shared by a limited audience who are very aware of who has done what, what is coming, what is inspired by what, what is the tradition of a certain type of dance and so on. But we feel that wherever we can, it’s important to try to open up to wider audiences. It’s important to give them context because you cannot take for granted that everybody knows the inspiration, the origins, how to understand or read a movement. If you bring some proposals and some works from one continent or one country to another, you need also to bring a context of explanation, so you know what they stand for and where they come from. This is one of our objectives.

Why was it important to strengthen your commitment to dance through Dance Reflections, how does it mark a new chapter and how does it differ from what you were doing before 2020?

It’s an ongoing evolution. In the history of dance for Van Cleef & Arpels, there’s been a continuity and a lot of different chapters. We’re trying to add some new bricks, while keeping the existing bricks. So it’s not moving from one thing to another, but we continue to support institutions, to support certain dance companies as we’ve done in the past, to support some forms of creation and collaborative works between different institutions, and then Dance Reflections was another brick to embrace different dimensions, in particular the idea of transmission and the building and preservation of the patrimony of contemporary dance that we didn’t cover at all in our previous initiatives.

As part of your Dance Reflections initiative, you have an annual dance festival, starting with London last year and now Hong Kong this month. How are the cities chosen each year?

We would love to do it everywhere, but we have to be a bit pragmatic. The idea of this program is really to work in collaboration with existing scenes. One of the prerequisites in the way that we go to places is where there is a kind of infrastructure, so it’s cities where you need to have some theaters, public spaces, museums and also actors in the field of dance that we can interact with to develop this type of program. And we also choose cities and places where the brand has a presence because in order to support the activities of the festival, it’s much easier where we have our own logistics, teams and connections than to do it remotely. But the map of dance and culture and the map of our presence strangely overlaps a bit. So yes, New York, LA, Hong Kong, Paris, London, Tokyo, those are the places on the map, and then the idea is progressively from these places and from the relationship that we build with local players to extend and to be able to reach different audiences, maybe in cities where we don’t have a presence as a brand, but where we have already built some structures or partnerships in the area.