We are now open ! Click here to book your tickets.
You can attend the show every Saturday at 6pm and Sunday at 3pm, except in July and August when the show is at 6pm on Saturdays and 5pm on Sundays.

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A classical rigor tempered with baroque touches

“When I imagined the academy project, I immediately considered it as an opportunity to share with the public. The equerries must present to the audience the fruit of their daily labor.” Bartabas

Every weekend, the squires present in the beautiful riding arena of the Great Stable, the show “La Voie de l’écuyer”; a repertoire constantly enhanced which evolves through the cavaliers’ experiences, diverse creations, the several artistic disciplines taught at the Academy and renowned artists invited to mix the work of both companies.

This entity allows the audience to feel the precision of the relationship between the equerries and their horses, more than the techniques involved.

Carrousel of the Lusitanians, Sorraias with long reins, fencing on horseback and equestrian improvisations are performed to the sound of selected pieces by Bach.

Simplicity and virtuosity, lightness and subtlety are what equerries are daily looking for, and try to transmit in every performance.

Every representation is followed by a visit of the Grand Stable.

You can attend the show every Saturday at 6pm and Sundays at 3pm.

Tickets: from 16 € to 28 €.  Booking.

You are coming to Versailles during a weekend, and also want to visit the Palace ? Buy a 2-days ticket combining our show, the visit of the Palace and the “Grandes Eaux” show : here

In September, the Equestrian Academy is back on tour at the Seine Musicale, for its new creation “Le Sacre de Stravinsky”, choreographed by Bartabas.

Sacre du Printemps

Symphonie de Psaumes

A BARTABAS creation

With :

The Equestrian Academy of Versailles

The Philharmonic of Radio France, directed by Mikko Franck

The Choir of Radio France directed by Lionel Sow

After the Requiem of Mozart’s success, and for its second collaboration with the Seine Musicale, Bartabas choses to redo for the Equestrian Academy of Versailles its famous choreographies of the Stravinsky’s “Sacre du Printemps” and “Symphonie des Psaumes”

Created in 2000 in Amsterdam for Zingaro, these two choreographies were a part of Pierre Boulez’s “Triptyk” show, together with the “Dialogue de l’Ombre Double”. “Triptyk” has been played in the whole world, from Moscow to Los Angeles.

For this second time, the Academy equerries will stand in for the Zingaro acrobats. Indian dancers from Kalarippayatt will engage the telluric choreography invented by Bartabas.

For Bartabas, this is also a first collaboration with two musical ensembles of Radio Franche: the Philharmonic of Radio France, directed by Mikko Franck et the Choir of Radio France, exceptionally directed by Lionel Sow.

Horses are just like children. Ponies, particularly so. They like to play, tease each other, squabble, daydream, and enjoy the present without worrying about the past or the future. They are wary of adult bipeds, who think they can order them around with brusque gestures and sharp commands, which, if pushed too far, can give rise to a prodigious resistance that is not devoid of humour. One only has to see them galloping after one another in a field, tussling in the paddock, or nipping each other in a manège, whinnying raucously, to appreciate their ability to have fun and their disdain for the tiresome taskmasters who constantly want to ride them, train them or make them jump to order. It is this moment of freedom that the highly-skilled horseman Bartabas, transformed here into a sort of schoolmaster, sought to foster for this all-new Récréation, which offers a swift response to Hermès’ instruction: Let’s play !  (Jérôme Garcin)

SAUT HERMÈS 2018 – GRAND PALAIS
From the 16th to the 18th of March 2018

As part of the Mozartwoche 2017 and following the success of “Davide penitente” in 2015, Bartabas and Marc Minkowski collaborate again and propose Mozart’s “Requiem” for four exceptional performances in the Grand Festspielhaus of Salzburg.

Each year, aboutMozart’s birthday in January, the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg hosts the “Mozart Week” with opera performances, orchestra and chamber concerts as well as soloist recitals. World-renowned artists, soloists, orchestras and ensembles specialized in the interpretation of Mozart stand for the unparalleled reputation of this unique event. This concert series, inaugurated in 1956, invites visitors from around the world to rediscover Mozart’s works from ever-changing perspectives and to hear them anew.

Far from the hustle and bustle of the big Summer Festival, the winter is more intimate. The city’s high places of music are shared, including the legendary Felsenreitschule and its ninety-six arcades, dug out of the rock of the mountain.

In 2015, Marc Minkowski and Bartabas had imagined a unique show. For the first time in several centuries, horses had walked on the stage of the Felsenreitschule within the Grand Festspielhaus of Salzburg and had given three representations of “Davide penitente”.

This opera, which received a tremendous reception of the public, was broadcasted on Arte on June 21st, 2015 and edited in DVD (Production: BFMI production, in coproduction with the ORTF and Arte / Distribution: C Major Entertainment).

Further to the incredible success of this creation, Bartabas and Marc Minkowski collaborate again and propose the “Requiem” of Mozart, from January 26th till February 3rd, 2017, for four exceptional representations.

For the fourth time in seven editions of the Hermes jumping, the National equestrian Academy of Versailles was present under the glass roof of Paris’ Grand Palais. The riders realized a magnificent show with all the magnificence and the atmosphere which only Bartabas can create.

For this spectacular production of Mozart’s “Davide penitente” on the vast stage of the Salzburg Felsenreitschule at the Mozart Week 2015, Marc Minkowski and the equestrian choreographer Bartabas used dancing horses and thus restored the former riding school to its original function.

Horses, riders from the Académie équestre de Versailles and Bartabas himself, whose successful productions are unique in the world of art, perform their elegant dressage arabesques within this exceptional setting. Soloists, chorus and orchestra are ranged over three levels on galleries cut from the bare rock. The result is a unique synthesis of the arts.

“A festival of beauty” – Munich Abendzeitung

“Minkowski and Bartabas have created a great piece of theatre” – NMZ

For the third time, Bartabas displays the inaugural show of the legendary “Saut Hermès” at the Grand Palais in Paris. This year, China, Xian horses and Qin archeries are his inspiration. The Terracotta Army of Xian is coming to life.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the diplomatic relation between France and China and in premise of the Chinese New Year placed under the sign of the Horse, the event Nuit de Chine, organized in the Grand Palais of Paris, welcomed a new and eponym creation of Bartabas for the equestrian Academy of Versailles.

This show is inspired by the 8000 soldiers army of emperor Qin Shihuang terra-cotta army, discovered in 1974 in Xian,China, which by the magic of the show relived under the windows of the Grand Palais.

“This very hieratic image of these physical characters who put themselves little by little in movement, until they wildly arrive, represents the exchanges from nowadays, when everything accelerates all over the world.” – Bartabas

“[…] So, in the heart of Paris, Lusitanians cremellos with blue eyes and grey Argentine Criollos ridden by cosmopolitan equerries are going to dance on a French music of Arab-Andalusian inspiration, under the direction of a fantastic centaur who represents at the same time Quichotte, François Baucher and the king of gypsies.

That’s an understatement that we are going to gallop in the space and time. The unlimited space of the riders who never turn around; the infinite time of horses, by which the prodigious memory seems to precede the birth. The hardest will be to return then to the real life and to the city of the pedestrians.”

Jérome Garcin – extract

Two creators passionate about their art, Carolyn Carlson and Bartabas, are combining worlds and joining forces in dance and visual magic.

The first brings poetry in movement, embodied by her dance company, and the second a fascinating energy borne by the Equestrian Academy, moving like a corps de ballet. Both make use of instinct, sensitivity and achievement in creation led by a deep, inner need. There is no need for further explanation: the artistic flow in itself states the obvious.

Viewpoints intermingle and enrich one another in this original experience: orchestrating together twelve riders and sixteen dancers in grace and power. The repetitiveness of Philip Glass; Music in Twelve Parts echoes the horses infinite movement around the dancers, a hypnotic spiral evoking a growing trance-like state.

Only two performances will be given of this equestrian “Charivari” in artificial light on the Saturday night and in board daylight on the Sunday afternoon. A Bartabas choreography for the Académie du Spectacle Equestre in Versailles, as well as a show performed with the help of horses and riders from the Theatre Equestre d’Aubervilliers.

“Six movements, a dazzling, pure, and simple half-hour, always in astonishing movement, even if based on what one could call “Bartabas syntax”. The two teams rehearse together once on the Friday and this enchanting burst of horses… two at the opening of the show and nearly forty at the end. (…)” Armelle Heliot – Le Figaro – 5 April 2010

Under the celestial vaults of the Saint-Ouen Abbey in Rouen, Normandy, this show celebrates the union of the secular and the sacred.

With  the organist Vincent Dubois and the Basque singer Beñat Achiary.

“Now accustomed to the theatre as a venue, Bartabas has given his all and you can understand why the Versailles rider has chosen Glass and his bewitching, haunting pieces: the arithmetic of his music coincides perfectly with the geometry and symmetry of the equestrian ballets tightly led by the riders of the Académie Equestre de Versailles, and the roman theatre starts to resemble the gardens designed by Lenôtre.”

Françoise Monnet – Le Progrès – 9 June 2008

In “Les Juments de La Nuit”, Bartabas imagined a universe off the wall, closer to the shows of Zingaro. He drew this time his inspiration from the cinema: the version of Macbeth realized by Orson Welles, and the transposition of the Shakespeare’s play in Japan of the warlords of the Castle of the Spider, by Akira Kurosawa. “Les Juments de la Nuit” announces as a series of epic and baroque visual poems, staging lady Macbeth’s dreams, and merging two places and two periods: the Scotland of the XIth century and Japan of the XVIth.

A fusion of colors also, mixing horses “cream”, Argentine or Lusitanian.

A talented fusion, finally, gathering dancers, riders of the Academy and the acrobats of Zingaro.

“It’s the opening show of the Nuits de Fourvière, multidisciplinary festival of Lyon which celebrates its sixtieth birhtday […]. The program includes Alexandre Tharaud, pianist virtuoso in rocker’s looks, which reinterprets the Italian Concertos of Bach, and Bartabas, rider-director on stage. […] In what can appear as a show of compulsory faces – where become famous ten young riders of the Academy of Versailles -, it is impossible not to be impressed by the requirement and the relevance of the images […].”

René Solis – Libération – 16 juin 2006

Led by Bartabas, more than seventy horses and twenty-five horsemen tell the story of a young cabin boy born in 1736 in Quimper (Brittany, FR), René Madec. His extraordinary fate is set in a feeric and spectacular show.

With the Equestrian Academy of Versailles and the Zingaro Theatre.

Bartabas invites us to discover the outstanding fate of the knight of Saint George, a man of exception, mulatto, who knew how to be appreciated by his multiple talents of violinist, fencer and rider. Celebrate under Louis XVI, he then disappear into oblivion during two centuries.

Bartabas finds his inspiration in this with a ruddy complexion character, and this equestrian and pyrotechnic symphony evoking the tradition of the festivities formerly given to the Castle, made this swashbuckler hero live again with more than fifty horses and riders,percussionists, comedians, dancers, musicians.