Adelaide Festival has announced that Christian Spuck’s production of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem, featuring Ballett Zürich, will be the centrepiece of its 2023 program, running over the middle weekend of the festival.

Spuck has been Artistic Director of Ballett Zürich since 2012. In 2019, he won the prestigious Prix Benois de la Danse for Best Choreography for his Ballett Zürich production of Winterreise, choreographed to Schubert’s famous song cycle.

Christian Spuck’s Messa da Requiem is coming to the 2023 Adelaide Festival. Photo © Carlos Quezada

For Messa da Requiem, he integrates more than 200 singers, musicians and dancers into the dark world that he creates on stage, where the performers – mostly dressed in black – emerge from dramatic, chiaroscuro lighting, while a thin layer of grey ash covers the floor. Together, the performers bring a physical shape to Verdi’s sublime masterpiece, evoking a huge mass of humanity that conjures the emotions associated with death – grief, horror, anger, pain and hope for redemption.

Spuck has said: “I would like to find poignant...