creation 2013

élégie

Creation for 17 dancers

Creation

Olivier Dubois

Interpretation

17 performers

Creation Assistant

Cyril Accorsi

Duration of the show

60 minutes

Lights

Patrick Riou

Music

Richard Wagner Elégie WWV 93 en la bémol – François Caffenne

Production

Ballet National de Marseille

Coproduction

COD • Compagnie Olivier Dubois

Creation

28th Augustus 2013 in the frame of “Aout en Danse”, Marseille-Provence, 2013

The stage is black. Spectators are blinded by the darkness surrounding them. They can barely make out the outlines of a man before realizing that this fragment of humanity is being carried by a wave of shadows. A flowing lava of fusional beings at the threshold of Hell, who could be trying to get out or stopping anyone escaping …

‘Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels ?’ wrote the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke in 1923 in “The Duino Elegies” (which inspired this supernatural work), sounding the death knell for romanticism and setting out on a path towards lyrical, inward-turning symbolism. His text which speaks of man’s place in the world, was an instant cult hit.

After ‘L’après-midi d’un faune’, ‘Le Lac des cygnes’ and ‘Le Boléro’, this new incursion into the adventure of intellectual and melancholy revolutions is a means for Dubois, a choreographer of insurrection and resistance, to reaffirm that we must ‘give evidence of the expressions of our world in order to save it and resuscitate it, invisible within ourselves’ to quote the biologist Alain Zecchini.

Whith this ‘bereavement song of the angel’ Dubois reminds us once more that being human is not synonymous with humanity. A powerful dark, spellbinding opus set to compelling music by Richard Wagner and François Caffenne.

Ce qu’ils en pensent

‘Olivier Dubois undermines the fine organisation of the Marseille Ballet. A little more than a year after creating Tragedie, whose impact still sends waves through the dance scene … Olivier Dubois returns to the basics : the body. In a stage setting punctuated only by the lighting of Patrick Riou, a silhouette awakens. A tableau vivant, Elégie summons references from a dark romanticism.
Little by little, the eye becomes used to this play of darkness and light until it perceives a moving ballet corps, a human lava flow partnering the soloist, the fantastic Gabor Halasz. This triumph of imagination over reality  … here materialises as an accompagnied solo of chilling beauty.
Dubois confronts the individual with another powerful force : hell, the void or death. His obvious command of the stage is unsettling’.

Philippe Noisette in Les Inrockuptibles