KADER BELARBI - BALLET DU CAPITOLE

What could be more gratifying for an Opera House to be able to combine music, dancing and singing, during the same evening ! This will be done with the Stravinsky's Evening proposed by the Théâtre du Capitole which will bring together its three « living forces », the Ballet, the Orchestra and the Choir, for our greatest happiness. The programme is composed of three very different ballets on three vocal works by Igor Stravinsky : neoclassical with Pulcinella, liturgical and mystical with Symphony of Psalms, iconoclastic with Les Noces. With Pulcinella, as Stravinsky searching for Pergolesi's undervalued partitions, we rediscover the past. The past of the Neapolitan commedia dell'arte of 17th and 18th centuries in which the protagonist, Pulcinella, is still and always an inveterate seducer, a « Swashbuckler », a fighter and a braggart. Under the disguise, he devotes himself to his usual loving games, in a playful and acrobatic choreography where the big farce has nothing to envy to the Italian model. Jiri Kylian is a choreographer burning for spirituality as testify his recent works. Already in 1978 with Symphony of Psalms, inspired by the songs of the Russian Orthodox Church, he echoed the songs by transforming dance into prayer. A prayer that celebrates the survival of spirituality over materialism. Confined within the limits of the stage, metaphor of the constraints imposed on us by life, the dancers express suffering, pain, grief but also tenderness, love and hope in "a dramatic feast whose rhythms carry along emotional and pathetic streams." A profane prayer for the survival of humanity. Wherever performed, Les Noces by the Belgian choreographer Stijn Celis has left no one indifferent, no more fans than detractors. Where Bronislava Nijinska in 1923 featured a traditional Russian peasants wedding in a constructivist aesthetics, Stijn Celis openly criticizes the marriage and calls into question the validity of this institution in our society. He turns the celebration of this forced marriage into a dark sacrificial ritual hustled along on the spellbinding and "barbaric" score by Stravinsky. The broken gesture, the jerky movement and the hectic pace of the choreography perfectly translate the abstract and complex structure of the music, featuring a delirious peasant wedding, both expressionist and intense.

About this play by Montherlant, Maeterlinck believes that his writing "is enough to justify a life". This monument of drama tells the true story of Don Pedro of Portugal and his illegitimate wife, ines de Castro who, strangely, became queen after her death. Adapting this overwhelming stroy into a ballet, the french choreographer Kader Belarbi, "convinced that tragedy is one of the keys to decipher the enigma of human behavior and relationships between people", tackles the theme of mad love thwarted by reason of State. In a neoclassical choreography, he reveals all the beauty and the engravings of the "dagger with the damascened hilt, black and gold", to borrow the words of Montherlant.