Mats Ek
Choreographer
Sweden
In 2026, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels is supporting the Opéra de Lyon for the entry of Mats Ek's The Rite of Spring into its repertoire.
The son of choreographer Birgit Cullberg and Anders Ek, who acted in films by Ingmar Bergman, Mats Ek is a choreographer who first studied theater before training with dancer Donya Feuer in Stockholm. Ek was first an assistant director at the Royal Dramatic Theatre and the Stockholm Puppet Theatre before joining the Cullberg Ballet in 1973 as a dancer. He began choreography in 1976 with works including The Officer’s Servant, Saint George and the Dragon and Soweto. After a season as a dancer with the Ballet of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf, and another season as both dancer and choreographer with Nederlands Dans Theater in The Hague, he became artistic director of the Cullberg Ballet from 1981 to 1993.
He has choreographed numerous ballets, reinterpreting the classical repertoire—including Giselle (Adam), Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty (Tchaikovsky) and Carmen (Bizet)—as well as creating original works for stage and film, such as The House of Bernarda, Wet Woman (with Sylvie Guillem) and Smoke (with Sylvie Guillem and Niklas Ek). He has also directed and choreographed operas—Orpheus and Eurydice (Gluck) and The Magic Flute (Mozart)—as well as plays such as The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), Don Juan (Molière), Andromache (Racine) and The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov), developing a form of danced theater inspired notably by Martha Graham, Pina Bausch and Kurt Jooss. He has collaborated with numerous institutions worldwide, including the Geneva Opera, Oslo Opera, Royal Swedish Opera, Finnish National Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, Hamburg Ballet, Metropolitan Opera and American Ballet Theatre in New York, Paris Opera Ballet, Bavarian State Ballet in Munich, La Scala in Milan, Zurich Opera Ballet, Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, Martha Graham Dance Company and The Royal Ballet in London, among others
He has received a great number of awards throughout his distinguished career, including the Benois de la Danse Prize and the Europe Theatre Prize, and is a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic.
His works in the repertoire of the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon include Eldstad, Carmen, Solo for Two, Fluke and Giselle.
