A few hours watching Ballet de Lorraine interpret Loîc Touzé and Maud Le Pladec in Nancy’s opera is luxury – quality art, choreography, culture, lovely venue, a little jewel of a big provincial town with nice shops and restaurants, friendly people.
The neat and spacious neoclassical-cum-art deco city is a good place to be.
If Nancy opera director Petter Jacobsson and his crew are working with the tourist board to bring weekenders to the city, they’re doing a job that merits twice whatever the contract might say. But, in a wobbly-minded act of panicky post-Covid foot-shooting, I am sorry to say, the regional authorities have just cut Jacobsson’s already-strained budget by 10% across the board.
There’s no other ballet company with quite the group vibe of the Ballet de Lorraine. They radiate the easy confidence of lovers. Whether at their home in Nancy or on tour, I come away from a Ballet de Lorraine performance feeling as if I’ve made acquaintance – acquaintance with somebody else’s sense of the world.
I think this sense is down to the company’s diversity. Not so much a diversity of morphologies, postures, ethnicities. That’s just a mirror of France today. More important, “diversity” seems for them an expression of the right to be who one is on stage: an individual person, a distinct person, even in a group of individuals.
Their performance style certainly gives the person space.
The company doesn’t seem to work so much to a standard as within parameters: through a mix of individual interpretations and a will to fuse talents, they seem to work towards a cumulative act of imagination rather than to an ideal enforced by instruction and correction. The result is that I find myself less admiring the execution of a phrase than waiting for what comes next. As a narrative of movement, they are more thriller than romance.
There is something of the high-wire acrobat ethic in the Ballet de Lorraine: in the end, good performance, group confidence and staying whole amount to the same thing. I am thinking especially of Machine de Cirque, the Québec troupe whose approach ensures that “mistakes” come out as exciting “variations” on their flow of titillating antics, at least for the audience.
Click to get a taste of Ballet de Lorraine’s “perfection in execution” through time and mix of choreographies.
Ballet de Lorraine’s 2022-23 season has opened with program 1 featuring Loîc Touzé’s No Oco (Portuguese for “Not empty”) and Maud Le Pladec’s Static Shot.
Both pieces have in part at least been created as part of the opera’s celebration of the community of creators, performers, artisans and citizens that make it up and carry it forward. Program 2, in April 2023, also feature new creations, Rarity, by Adam Linder and Dancefloor, by Michèle Murray. Program 3, in May and June 2023, will do a mix of modern dance legend, commemoration, remix, contemporary, invited repertory and classy hip-hop – Sounddance, For Four Walls, Air Condition, Un Boléro, Cela nous concerne tous (“This concerns everybody”) and Earthbound. I am looking especially forward to Un Boléro, choreography by Dominique Brun and François Chaignaud, noting that Chaignaud’s Souflette got me appreciating old-style camp. Also, he’s always wild, or tries to be.
Ballet de Lorraine (and its host city) are worth a train ride.
Diversity is the key success factor behind Ballet de Lorraine: the right to express the individual person within the company’s endeavor.
Diversity is the key success factor behind Ballet de Lorraine: the right to express the individual person within the company’s endeavor.
Comments