Noces & Opus 40 – Jean-Christophe Maillot

Noces

In creating Noces in 2003, to music by Stravinsky - who completed the instrumentation in Monaco in 1923 - Jean-Christophe Maillot paid tribute to the Principality, offering it a reminder of one of the highlights of the Ballets Russes. These Noces carry a relationship of immediacy and an exacerbated expressiveness that characterises the end of the festivities, the return of order after the chaos. The choreographer wanted to "generate a spontaneous relational state between the spectator and the performance in originality and freedom from tradition".

Opus 40

The choreographer was forty years old in July 2000 when he created this ode to youth. Without a narrative framework, the dance follows the theme of pleasure. We are thus invited to go back to the imagination of our childhood, to rediscover lost sensations, the first stirrings of our flesh. Meredith Monk's guttural yet familiar voice accompanies this intimate odyssey, punctuating the dancers' steps with the evocation of the tastes of our youth. The cry of birds, the smell of coffee, first loves... For it is appropriate to return to these simple attractions of life to get through pivotal periods. The choreographic material also ventures into the realms of secret joys, culminating in languid duets that symbolise the return to adulthood, assumed, made acceptable, because sublimated by the love that soothes and provides the serene plenitude of an intense existence.