Songes

creation 2009

"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"   William Butler Yeats.

A baroque dream for the 21st century

Baroque fantasies hold the key to entering the delightful world of chimeras and mirages.

Our route through European baroque music navigates between vast excepts from Lully, Charpentier, Vivaldi and Purcell’s body of work. Such colour-contrasted pieces energize the suspended time of slumber to suggest an imaginary wandering path.

The nine dancers’ clear, luminous outlines are sometimes dressed in robes unfolding to amplify the movement as huge wings would, or in the contrary morphing their bodies into strange, captive chrysalides.

Songesquestions the verticality of the baroque body and its resonating surroundings, occasionally giving it nightmarish, menacing overtones.

If dreaming means being on the moon, then let us take a trip and lay the sky on a vast painted ellipse through which the dancers shall move.

Let us play with mirror elements as well, fragmenting the fresco, giving it a new verticality, dividing it, shedding it of any remaining bit of reality it might still hold.

Such a project is built through tremendous team work, with the help of Rémi Nicolas, light and stage designer, Dominique Fabrègue, costume designer (both our accomplices in creating Que ma joie demeure), as well as Jean-Claude Malgoire at the helm of his musicians from La Grande Ecurie et la Chambre du Roy.

The first few performances shall be recorded, giving the show further visibility.

The troupe for Songes is made up of high level dancers, some of whom have been accompanying Fêtes Galantes in its creative work for a number of years. Here, too, our bonds are born from an ever-changing common language: baroque dance.

Together, we are building a collective dream—an ever-changing baroque dream for today which invites us to challenge our perceptions.

Béatrice Massin, June 2009.