"The ballet is not all sadness," Roman said. "It is bursting with joy and energy."
Bejart's ballets often polarize opinion, and not just for their subject matter.
Many balletomanes find them too theatrical -- no surprise given Bejart's experience as a director of plays and operas -- and lacking in sufficient dance. Other critics have called them chaotic. Europeans and Japanese love them, while the response in Britain and the US has been more lukewarm. The one thing everyone seems to be able to agree on is that they are rarely boring.
Dancers, however, adore them. Company member Roger Cunningham, an American who spent 10 years with the Boston Ballet, said one of the reasons he wanted to join the the Bejart Ballet Lausanne five years ago was the chance to do more contemporary pieces instead of the classics that US companies focus on.
Cunningham said the Bejart gives dancers the chance to explore their abilities -- and to stretch them.
Bejart has been quoted as saying: "My ballets are first encounters ... with a piece of music, with life, death, love ... with people whose past and work are embodied in me, just like the dancer -- which I no longer am -- who each time embodies characters that go beyond him. Imagination, violence, humor, love. Everything is there."
The Bejart Ballet Lausanne is the third of Bejart's companies, founded in 1987 in the wake of the Ballet de l'Etoile in Paris and the Ballet du XXe Siecle in Brussels.
The full company, 30 dancers, is making its first appearance in Taipei, the fourth Asian city on this tour, after Seoul, Beijing and Shanghai.
Among the principal dancers featured in Ballet for Life are dancer and choreographer Kathryn Bradney, Elizabet Ros and Cunningham.
For those who don't speak French, Le Presbytere N'a Rien Perdu De Son Charme, Ni Le Jardin De Son Eclat translates as The Priest House Has Not Lost Its Charm, Neither Has the Garden Has Lost Its Glamour.
What does it mean in relation to the ballet? Absolutely nothing.
It is a phase taken from a book written in the 1920s by Gaston Leroux, a secret code used by one of the characters.
In his notes on the ballet, Bejart says that the phrase became a cult hit among surrealists in the 1920s and he just happens to like it and wanted to use it because "it gives nothing away and has a nice rhythm when you say it."
That's classic Bejart: throwaway phasing combined with spectacular gestures and doing things just because he likes them even if no one understands.
Performance Notes
What: Ballet for Life
Where and When: National Theater, today through Sunday at 7:30pm.
Tickets: NT$1,000 to NT$4,000. Tickets are available through major ticketing outlets or at the door.
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