Unusual and prestigious dancing places for Paris in summer
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Louvre Museum, Cour Lefuel, Paris. 11/VII/22. As part of Paris l’été. Ballet Preljocaj: Boléro, excerpt from Gravité (2018). Choreography: Angelin Preljocaj. Music: Maurice Ravel, 79D. Costumes: Igor Chapurin. Lights: Eric Soyer. Assistant rehearsal: Cécile Médour. Assistant and assistant to the artistic direction: Youri Aharon Van den Bosch. Choreologist: Dany Lévêque. Dancers: Angela Alcantara Miranda, Leonardo Cremaschi, Matthew Emig, Isabel Garcia Lopez, Florette Jager, Erwan Jean Pouvreau, Yu Hua Lin, Théa Martin, Victor Martinez Caliz, Zoë McNeil, Nuriya Nagimova, Redi Shtylla
Grand Palais ephemeral, Paris. 12/VII/22. As part of Paris l’été. Mette Ingvartsen: The dancing audience. Concept & performance: Mette Ingvartsen. Lighting: Minna Tikkainen. Scenography: Mette Ingvartsen & Minna Tiikkainen. Musical arrangements: Mette Ingvartsen & Anne van de Star. Costumes: Jennifer Defays. Dramaturgy: Bojana Cvejic. Music: Affkt feat. Sutja Gutierrez, Scanner, Radio Boy, LCC, VII Circle, Kangding Ray, Paula Temple, Ron Morelli, Valanx, Anne van de Star
Each year, the Festival Paris l’été forges partnerships with exceptional heritage sites. For the opening of the 2022 edition, the dancers of Angelin Preljocaj settle in the Cour Lefuel of the Louvre Museum to Bolero. At the ephemeral Grand Palais, Mette Ingvartsen offers a hypnotic performance entitled The dancing crowd.
Bolero in the Cour Lefuel of the Louvre Museum
The nocturnal journey through the rooms of Greek Antiquity of the Louvre Museum, from the pre-classical period to the Hellenistic period, offered as a preamble to the show Bolero of the Ballet Preljocaj, are so many ways for the viewer to practice seeing a body in motion. These athletes frozen in the stone of the severe era, these conquering figures of Pallas Athenaeus are so many perfect or triumphant bodies. A magnificent stroll that takes us to the Cour Lefuel, which is normally inaccessible to the public.
Seen up close, the dancers descending from the double ramp in this courtyard of the Napoleon III part of the Louvre, also have the requirement of the perfect body.
On a totally open stage, very close to the spectators seated on stepped platforms, on three sides they fit perfectly into the bouquet structure designed by Preljocaj on Maurice Ravel’s score.
A chiseled and geometric work organized by couples, whose choreography discreetly quotes the famous version of Maurice Béjart. Dividing the dancers into two concentric circles requires great precision and absolute concentration, to keep the gaps even, to reproduce each movement identically, as a corps de ballet does. This does not prevent the dancers, accomplices, from smiling when they face each other.
The dancing crowdperformance by Mette Ingvartsen at the ephemeral Grand Palais
The dancing crowd, it is not, however, the public that surrounds the choreographer and dancer Mette Ingvartsen but the evocation of the dancing public of the victims of choremania. Both narrator and performer, Mette Ingvartsen begins her story a few months after the Black Death. She describes as a historian a curious phenomenon, largely unexplained, which saw simple citizens being seized with an irrepressible desire to dance, following a shock or an illness. The strangest thing is that this insatiable thirst for movement was contagious, contaminating like the epidemics of towns and entire villages. A contagion which is reminiscent of that of the epidemic which has struck the whole world for more than two years.
In the dark space of the ephemeral Grand Palais, between three luminous masts and raw wood podiums, Mette Ingvartsen enjoys spawning in the middle of the public already animated by the electronic sounds of DJ Anne van de Star. They too are taken by dansomania, by mimicry perhaps, the public dances, following the performer with their eyes. We see clubbers accustomed to electronic music, young people who want to party, spectators delighted with this opportunity given to them to dance in turn.
But Mette Ingvartsen, after brushing the audience in the direction of the hair, rediscovered her customary radicalism over the course of her performance, as in her cycle The red pieces in the required class she explored issues of sexuality. Gradually sliding towards other forms of dansomania dissected by the medical profession, she embarked on a hysterical experience in the proper sense, drawing inspiration from the photographic archives of Doctor Charcot at La Salpêtrière. His body then becomes an object of struggle, claim and liberation, in a jubilant peak.
Photographic credits: Gravity © Quentin Chevrier (at the Louvre Museum); The dancing audience © Marc Domage
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Louvre Museum, Cour Lefuel, Paris. 11/VII/22. As part of Paris l’été. Ballet Preljocaj: Boléro, excerpt from Gravité (2018). Choreography: Angelin Preljocaj. Music: Maurice Ravel, 79D. Costumes: Igor Chapurin. Lights: Eric Soyer. Assistant rehearsal: Cécile Médour. Assistant and assistant to the artistic direction: Youri Aharon Van den Bosch. Choreologist: Dany Lévêque. Dancers: Angela Alcantara Miranda, Leonardo Cremaschi, Matthew Emig, Isabel Garcia Lopez, Florette Jager, Erwan Jean Pouvreau, Yu Hua Lin, Théa Martin, Victor Martinez Caliz, Zoë McNeil, Nuriya Nagimova, Redi Shtylla
Grand Palais ephemeral, Paris. 12/VII/22. As part of Paris l’été. Mette Ingvartsen: The dancing audience. Concept & performance: Mette Ingvartsen. Lighting: Minna Tikkainen. Scenography: Mette Ingvartsen & Minna Tiikkainen. Musical arrangements: Mette Ingvartsen & Anne van de Star. Costumes: Jennifer Defays. Dramaturgy: Bojana Cvejic. Music: Affkt feat. Sutja Gutierrez, Scanner, Radio Boy, LCC, VII Circle, Kangding Ray, Paula Temple, Ron Morelli, Valanx, Anne van de Star
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