“In Don Quixote, what inspires me is Cervantes’ philosophical substance, of which I offer an abstract and sensitive reading. The aim is not to tell the story, but to make its energy resonate: the power of dreams, the desire to live differently, the struggle, at once derisory and sublime, against reality. In Cervantes, the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance stands up against a disenchanted world, ruled by reason and irony, where the ideal no longer has a place.

Across the plains of La Mancha, his journey is as much geographical as it is inner: a spiritual crossing in which every step in the dust blurs the line between illusion and truth. To me, this movement resonates as a metaphor for the artist’s path, a constant back-and-forth between the world and oneself, between the real and the imaginary.

It is often said that what Don Quixote truly confronts, beyond the windmills, are the invisible boundaries 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, a driving force of courage and a refuge of hope.

In this figure I recognise the artist, haunted by visions, often alone in the face of the world’s incomprehension, yet always driven by the need to create. Like Don Quixote, the artist persists in believing in beauty, in poetry, in the power of gesture. This vital impulse, fragile and stubborn, runs through the piece as a meditation on the artist’s condition: between lucidity and utopia, between solitude and faith in art.

It celebrates this stubbornness to believe, to love, to fight against reality, not out of naivety or heroism, but out of necessity.

Don Quixote is my third creation for the Ballet Biarritz, but the first shaped by the awareness of my future responsibility as its director. This prospect gives new intensity to an intimate question: how do we keep dreaming, loving and creating when the weight of reality grows heavier? How do we keep alive the madness essential to art without losing our sense of measure?”

Martin Harriague