Some performances don’t announce themselves as ‘cultural moments’. They simply arrive with a kind of inevitability: the right theatre, the right artist, the right idea, assembled with enough rigour that nothing feels ornamental.
On 8 March 2026, Dubai Opera presents MODANSE, a double bill led by Svetlana Zakharova with an ensemble from the Bolshoi Ballet. The programme opens with Come Un Respiro (Like a Breath), choreographed by Mauro Bigonzetti and set to Handel. After the interval, the evening turns to Gabrielle Chanel, a one-act ballet portrait choreographed by Yury Possokhov, with music by Ilya Demutsky and libretto and direction by Alexei Frandetti.
It’s tempting to describe the second act as ‘fashion meets ballet’, but that phrasing is too flat for what this project is trying to do. Here, couture is not a theme; it is part of the narrative machinery. Dance, in turn, is not decoration; it is the language chosen to translate a life built on modernity, discipline, and the freedom to move.
Two works, two temperaments
The first act, Come Un Respiro (Like a Breath), runs 45 minutes. A graceful blend of Baroque elegance and modern aesthetics, with avant-garde costumes by Helena de Medeiros and lighting by Carlo Cerri. Set to Handel, it has the kind of musical clarity that makes any excess obvious — and that’s precisely the point. When contemporary movement sits convincingly inside that architecture, you feel what the title suggests — not softness, but breath as precision: inhalation, suspension, release.
It’s an intelligent opening choice, not because it ‘prepares’ the audience, but because it sets a standard. MODANSE is not built around spectacle. It is built around craft.
After a 25-minute interval, Gabrielle Chanel takes the stage for 60 minutes — and the tone shifts from musical structure to biographical tension. Not a neat chronology, but a portrait assembled through movement, atmosphere, and emotional contour.
Gabrielle Chanel, danced as an idea
Gabrielle Chanel is explicitly framed as a ballet about Chanel’s artistic and personal journey, explored through dance as an expression of beauty and freedom. It’s a useful premise because it doesn’t reduce her to icons. Instead, it moves towards something more exacting: what it means to build a life with a signature line, and to insist that elegance is never separate from how a body inhabits space.
Zakharova performs as Chanel. The cast includes Ana Turazashvili as Chanel’s Sister/Aunt, Mikhail Lobukhin as Étienne Balsan, and Artemy Belyakov as Arthur Capel. The production credits include set design by Maria Tregubova, video design by Ilya Starilov, and lighting by Ivan Vinogradov.
The score is central here. Demutsky’s music sustains more than one emotional register at once — lightness and tragedy, brief fascination and deeper feeling. That refusal to settle is precisely what makes a portrait feel lived-in rather than staged. Chanel’s story, like her public image, is not one colour. The ballet does not need to ‘explain’ that with words; it can carry it in rhythm, pacing, and the way a gesture is cut short or allowed to breathe.
Costume as dramaturgy, not illustration
If there is one detail that signals this production’s seriousness, it is the scale of CHANEL’s involvement in the costuming. Under the artistic direction of Virginie Viard, CHANEL’s Fashion Studio designed over 85 bespoke costumes exclusively for this performance, intended to reflect the house’s timeless elegance.
In theatre, costumes are often praised for beauty. In ballet, beauty is the baseline; the question is function. A costume must move, hold its line under light, support the body’s intent, and remain legible at a distance without becoming loud. When an atelier commits to creating a wardrobe at this scale for dancers, it becomes more than wardrobe. It becomes character, tempo, atmosphere — a form of stagewriting.
This is where Chanel feels particularly suited to ballet. The house’s most persuasive idea has always been ease: clothing that doesn’t fight the body, that doesn’t treat movement as a threat to silhouette. Ballet is a discipline of movement under pressure. Put the two together and you don’t get a collaboration; you get a shared grammar.
Chanel and dance: a cultural line that makes sense
Chanel’s documented connection with dance belongs to the same modernist ecosystem that shaped her wider artistic life. The house itself has long positioned dance as part of its cultural conversation, rather than a decorative association. The point is not nostalgia; it’s the logic of making.
Dance sharpens the question Chanel’s work keeps asking: what does modern elegance look like in motion? Not on a runway, but in life — walking, turning, entering a room, leaving one. The Chanel silhouette has always carried an implication of movement, and ballet makes that implication literal.
This is precisely why Gabrielle Chanel reads as more than branding. It uses the stage to return to first principles: line, restraint, control, and the freedom that comes from refusing excess.
Zakharova, and the discipline of portraying a life
MODANSE was created specifically for Zakharova and premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre on 22 June 2019. That origin matters: it frames the project not as a guest turn, but as a vehicle built around a dancer capable of carrying both classical authority and contemporary narrative.
Zakharova’s biography supports the casting in a straightforward way. She is a Bolshoi prima ballerina whose career sits at the top tier of classical repertory whilst remaining open to new commissions and cross-disciplinary projects. The Chanel role demanded research and a kind of internal transformation — not impersonation, but inhabitation.
Zakharova has spoken about the moment costume became character:
‘The first transformation took place before the photo session when I had my makeup and hair done like hers and I put on her costume and saw “Chanel'”in the mirror […] My task now is to inhabit her character and to dance her image with all her emotions and experiences as I feel it.’
That is a subtle task. Chanel is a figure shaped by precision: in cut, in image, in self-invention. To portray her in ballet is to portray control under emotion — the ability to keep the line even when the story behind it is not tidy. Zakharova, at her best, excels at precisely that kind of contradiction: technical clarity that still leaves room for atmosphere.
Why this night holds together
MODANSE works as a proposition because it treats the arts involved as equals. The first act sets a standard of musical intelligence and physical design; the second act uses costume, score, and stagecraft to carry narrative without turning it into literal biography. And at the centre, there is a performer with the seriousness to make ‘Chanel’ feel like a character rather than a concept.
If you go expecting a list of references, you may miss the point. What stays with you is more likely to be simpler: the way a silhouette behaves when it is asked to move at full intensity; the way music can suggest interiority without insisting on it; the way a life can be reduced to line, and still feel recognisable.
At a glance
Venue: Dubai Opera
Date: Sunday, 8 March 2026
Time: 8.00pm
Programme:
Come Un Respiro (Like a Breath) — 45 minutes
Interval — 25 minutes
Gabrielle Chanel — 60 minutes
Tickets: Book online here.
