Byrne, the brand-new watch brand participating in Geneva Watch Days 2022, brought a new perspective to the industry with its watches with moving indexes that change automatically every 24 hours.
Byrne is a very new brand, so new that even its Instagram (@byrnewatch) page was born on June 15th, but it has a mature attitude in watch design, a very refined air with a bright and humorous point of view.
But first, let’s go to Paris and the ballet “Apollo” staged three years ago with John Byrne, who has been fond of watches since his childhood and then turned to antique and modern watch restoration. Because the clock designed by Byrne has a deep connection with this ballet performance.
This neoclassical ballet piece, choreographed on stage by George Balanchine (he was 24 at the time) and music by Igor Stravinsky, was staged under the name “Apollo’s Muses”. Neoclassical ballet emerged a century ago in the 1920s. Artists of that time were looking for a way out of the swooning domination of ultra-romantic works of art. On the contrary, the solution was to develop a simpler, clean and minimalist attitude, free from complex elements. So much so that even the name of George Balanchine’s play changed over time and became just “Apollo”.
Neoclassical ballet has also been simplified over the past century. Balanchine, who worked with Picasso, Chanel, Matisse, Prokofiev and Stravinsky at that time, expanded the boundaries of ballet and turned it into a freer type of dance. The first work of the neoclassical style was “Apollo musagetes”. In classical mythology, Musagetes is the name given to the god Apollo, the protector of muses. Apollo meets three muses in the play: Calliope, goddess of poetry and rhythm (symbol tablet), Polymnia, goddess of mime (symbol of mask), and Terpsichore (symbol of lyre), goddess of dance.
