The Lesson

The Lesson is a one-act ballet choreographed by Flemming Flindt to a score by Georges Delerue, adapted from Eugène Ionesco's absurdist play La Leçon. It was first performed as a television production for Danish television on 16 September 1963 under the title Enetime, winning the Italia Prize; a stage version followed at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in April 1964. The ballet depicts a psychopathic ballet master who, assisted by his accompanist, systematically murders a succession of female pupils during private lessons. Flindt's work transposes Ionesco's pedagogical horror into the world of academic dance, exploiting the formal conventions of ballet class as a framework for increasingly sinister control.