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TicketsArts & Theatre · SG“Revue Show” by OSK Nippon Revue CompanySingtel Waterfront Theatre, Esplanade · SingaporeTicketsArts & Theatre · SG“Revue Show” by OSK Nippon Revue CompanySingtel Waterfront Theatre, Esplanade · SingaporeTicketsThe profile · researched 1 October 2026
Grey mantles over Berlin: the Ballet du Rhin's Wings of Desire returns to Strasbourg
Bruno Bouché's two-act adaptation of Wim Wenders' film, made for the 32 dancers of the Ballet de l'Opéra national du Rhin in 2021 and panned in Paris in 2023, is back on stage from 26 November 2026 — in a year when a completely separate opera of the same title has also been playing in France.
What the piece actually is
Les Ailes du désir is a ballet in two acts, one hour fifty minutes with an interval, choreographed by Bruno Bouché for the Ballet de l'Opéra national du Rhin and first danced at the opera house in Strasbourg on 30 October 2021. The source is Wim Wenders' 1987 film Der Himmel über Berlin, released in English as Wings of Desire: the angels Damiel and Cassiel hover above a divided city, listening to the inner voices of Berliners, until Damiel surrenders eternity for a trapeze artist called Marion. The company's own framing puts incarnation at the centre of the adaptation — weight, breath, suspension, the point at which a body can be hurt — which is the choreographic argument for retelling the film at all.
The company behind it is unusual in France. Based in Mulhouse and attached to the Opéra national du Rhin, it was recognised as a centre chorégraphique national in 1985 and remains the only one of the country's nineteen CCNs tied to an opera house. It fields 32 academically trained dancers drawn from a long list of countries and picked for stylistic range, and its repertoire runs from baroque work through reworked classics to new commissions. Tickets for the current revival are banded from €6 to €48, and the house recommends the piece from the age of eight.
Bouché's route from the Palais Garnier to the Rhine
Bouché joined the Ballet de l'Opéra national de Paris in 1996 and danced there under Brigitte Lefèvre in a repertoire that took in Rudolf Nureyev, Pina Bausch, William Forsythe and Angelin Preljocaj. He began making his own choreography in 2003 and took over the Ballet de l'Opéra national du Rhin in 2017, since when the bulk of his output has been made for the company that employs him.
That list is the context for Les Ailes du désir rather than an aside: Fireflies in 2018, 40D in 2019, the Wenders ballet in 2021, then They Shoot Horses Don't They? after Horace McCoy and Jérôme — made for the Strasbourg modern art museum's exhibition Aux temps du sida — both in 2023, and Pour le reste in 2024. He also re-staged Bless ainsi soit-Il in 2018 and Nous ne cesserons pas in 2024. His work outside the house in 2026 is a new creation for the ballet of the Chemnitz theatre, Caravaggio or the Silence of Our Heartbeats. Les Ailes du désir is the largest-scale literary adaptation in that run and the one the company keeps bringing back.
A borrowed score and a painted Berlin
There is no commissioned score. Bouché shares the musical dramaturgy credit with the composer Jamie Man, and the evening is assembled from Bach — the Sicilienne among the cues — Sibelius, Olivier Messiaen, Steve Reich, John Adams, Man's own music, Anohni and the Johnsons, and Einstürzende Neubauten, the last standing in for the rock concert that closes the film. At the Paris performances a pianist, Bruno Anguera Garcia, was credited on the music staff.
The visual team has stayed constant across revivals: sets by Aurélie Maestre, costumes by Thibaut Welchlin, lighting by David Debrinay, video by Étienne Guiol and dramaturgy by Christian Longchamp. The costume logic does most of the narrative work — long grey mantles for the angels, colour for the living, white shirts in the second act — and Guiol's projections supply the city the film shot on location. Reviewers of the 2021 run described an opening in which an angel surveys the audience from the top gallery, an image read as a nod to Bruno Ganz, and a second act built around dancers suspended above the stage.
A divided press
Danses avec la plume covered the Strasbourg performance of 31 October 2021 in a notice published on 5 November. The critic credited the company's virtuosity and singled out a mirrored pas de deux by Dongting Xing and Ryo Shimizu as impeccable, and described a mass scene in which 32 dancers in colour are quietly halted by grey-coated angels, followed by aerial work in the second act that the review called a hymn to life. The reservation was structural: the beauty of individual passages, it argued, never lets the ballet arrive at an identity of its own, and the piece raises the question of what choreography can add to a film that strong.
The Paris reception was harsher. Reviewing the Théâtre du Châtelet performance of 29 March 2023 for Bachtrack, Laurine Mortha gave one star out of five and called it « un ballet d'une grande platitude, qui parodie les scènes du film sans en rendre l'esprit » — a flat ballet that imitates the film's scenes without carrying their spirit. That verdict is three and a half years old and the production has not been re-made since, so anyone booking the November run is booking the same piece, not a revision of it.
Where it sits in the 2026/27 season
The Opéra national du Rhin presented its 2026/27 programme in Strasbourg on 4 May 2026, the first season assembled under its new artistic director, Chrysoline Dupont, who introduced it with a line from Pelléas et Mélisande — « Toutes les étoiles tombent – elles sont innombrables ce soir » — and a stated emphasis on emotion. The season holds five new opera productions, an oratorio, four ballets, a touring opera, a children's opera, plus recitals and concerts, with thirty per cent of seats priced under €50.
Les Ailes du désir is the revival inside that four-ballet strand. The company's listing gives the run as 26 November to 12 December 2026, split between the opera house in Strasbourg and La Filature in Mulhouse, and three performances are currently on sale at the front of it: 26 November at 7pm, 27 November at 8pm and 29 November at 3pm.
The title it shares with an opera
Anyone searching the name in 2026 will hit a second, unrelated stage work. Les Ailes du désir is also an opera by Othman Louati — his first — to a libretto by Gwendoline Soublin, commissioned by the French co-production network la co[opéra]tive from a concept and scenography by the puppeteer Johanny Bert, staged by Grégory Voillemet and conducted by Fiona Monbet. It had its world premiere at Le Bateau Feu in Dunkirk on 9 November 2023 and has toured since, reaching the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet in Paris from 12 to 15 February 2026 at €12 to €38.
That version runs about one hour forty without an interval, in French, and inverts the film's hierarchy: the angels are sung by living bodies while the humans appear as half-scale expressionist puppets, each worked in the open by three manipulators, with seven soloists, twelve bunraku-influenced figures and thirteen amplified players from Ensemble Miroirs Étendus. Marie-Laure Garnier sings the feminised angel Damielle, Romain Dayez Cassiel and Camille Merckx the trapezist Marion. Reviewing the Paris run, Arts-chipels praised Louati's fluid writing and the staging's handling of space while warning that the proliferation of theatrical effects can crowd the story. Louati has since premiered a second stage work, the video-opera Solaris made with Jacques Perconte, at La Condition Publique in Roubaix on 29 April 2026 and at the Théâtre Graslin in Nantes on 6 May 2026.
The show, now
The evening is a full-length narrative ballet of one hour fifty with one interval, danced to a compiled soundtrack rather than a single score, and there is no support act — the curtain goes up on the Wenders material and stays with it to the end. The production follows the film's shape: angels in long grey mantles move among Berliners dressed in colour, an angel watches the auditorium from the top gallery at the start, the full company of 32 fills the stage in a crowd scene that the grey figures gradually still, and the second act turns to suspended aerial work and white shirts as Damiel takes on a body, with Einstürzende Neubauten covering the concert sequence. Étienne Guiol's video supplies the city. Reviews have split on it: the 2021 Strasbourg run drew credit for the dancers' precision, with Dongting Xing and Ryo Shimizu's mirrored pas de deux called impeccable and the second-act flying described as a hymn to life, alongside the complaint that the piece never finds an identity apart from the film, while Bachtrack's notice of the Théâtre du Châtelet performance on 29 March 2023 gave one star and called it a flat parody of the film's scenes. Seats for the three performances now on sale — 26 November at 7pm, 27 November at 8pm, 29 November at 3pm — run from €6 to €48, and the house recommends it from age eight.
Researched from operanationaldurhin.eu · operanationaldurhin.eu · operanationaldurhin.eu · lafilature.org · jds.fr · jds.fr · bachtrack.com · dansesaveclaplume.com
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
Jonathan Boucher · CC0
Sandra Cohen-Rose and Colin Rose from Montreal, Canada · CC BY 2.0
Jean Gagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0
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