This season’s third ballet evening will offer an eagerly awaited première. STEPS, Switzerland’s largest festival of contemporary dance, which takes place throughout the country, will be opened for the first time by Zurich Ballet at the Opera House. For years, the festival organisers of Migros Culture Percent have presented the broad spectrum of modern dance in a stylistically varied, cross-border mixture of independent ensembles and large professional ballet companies. The evening created by Zurich Ballet especially for STEPS will present world premières of works by three of the internationally most sought-after choreographers, Wayne McGregor, Marco Goecke and Christian Spuck.

In his avant-garde ballet creations, the British choreographer Wayne McGregor combines elements of dance, film, music, visual art, technology and science. For years, in collaboration with brain researchers and geneticists he has occupied himself with the links between physical, physiological and psychological factors, and processes the results of his research in his dance pieces, which are dominated by risk and tempo. Wayne McGregor is the Artistic Director of Random Dance, the company in residence at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre. He has also been associated with the Royal Ballet  as Resident Choreographer since 2OO6, as well as working with the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, New York City Ballet and the Nederlands Dans Theater.

Marco Goecke will also be a guest of Zurich Ballet for the first time. Born in Wuppertal, he was appointed house choreographer of the Stuttgart Ballet in 2OO5. In recent years he has presented a respectable number of extraordinary world premières in Stuttgart and with prestigious international companies. With his succinct, avant-garde dance idiom, exploration and destruction of aesthetic boundaries, and an entirely new vocabulary of movement for the dancers, Goecke is considered one of today’s most innovative choreographers.

Ballet Director Christian Spuck will also be represented with a world première during this ballet evening. After his feature-length narrative ballets, he has attempted to reinterpret the genre of the narrative ballet in the short form of a one-act piece.