Tacita Dean was commissioned by The Royal Opera House in London to create the designs and costumes for a new ballet called The Dante Project. Co-produced with Paris Opéra, it premiered in London in October 2021 and was shown in the Palais Garnier in Paris until May 2023. The ballet is inspired by Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1307–1321) with new music by Thomas Adès and choreography by Wayne McGregor, and marks the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death.

The Dante Project is structured in three parts like the three acts of its literary source. Dante describes his journey through the underworld in the company of the Ancient Roman poet, Virgil. They first encounter the Inferno where the Gates of Hell bear the well-known inscription: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!” The second stage of their journey is Purgatory where “the soul of man is cleansed, made worthy to ascend to Heaven.” And in Paradise, the third and final stage where happiness awaits, Dante is accompanied by the deceased love of his youth, Beatrice.

For The Dante Project, Tacita Dean represents these three realms of Dante’s journey in an inspired odyssey through various mediums and means of representation, with works that move from drawing to photography and to film; from negative to positive, representation to abstraction, and monochrome to color. The moral connotations of these afterlife spaces are heightened by her insight into the technical and aesthetic potential of photography and film. For OUT OF THE BOX, the three works have been coherently choreographed following the chronological sequence of the ballet.