“Malón”, Opéra de Lorraine, 23 May 2024, premier. Photo © Laurent Philippe, Divergence Images
It’s just hard to overstate Ballet de Lorraine’s individual and collective ability to wrap themselves well and truly around a choreography. Linked performances of Maud Le Pladec’s Static Shot, a giant pulsing and trembling tableau vivant, and Ayelen Parolin’s Malón (“Chaos Agents”), a contemplative ballet, on the summer bill at Opéra national de Lorraine, are the most recent demonstration.
Maud Le Pladec writes that for Static Shot “… The movement of images, the energy and rhythm make up a single scene that is from beginning to end at the apogee of its visual and physical intensity…”. Ayelen Parolin explains that her dance extracts the essence of opposites attract.
Essentially, Static Shot performers first do a half-hour’s desperate, sex grapple, like Ares and Aphrodite
Got me pullin’ off my gold. Got me leavin’ my jewelry on your kitchen floor… (Oh! Baby - Jessy Wilson, 2024)
Then, half an hour later, they sluice onto stage as energetic yet thoughtful Merry Pranksters,
So we sailed up to the sun/'Til we found the sea of green/And we lived beneath the waves/ In our yellow submarine (Yellow Submarine - The Beatles, 1966)
As my son used to say when he was cute and little, “Même pas fatigué, Daddy”: the Ballet come off as natives in both types of performance energy budgets.
The first time I experienced Static Shot, about two years ago, I felt it as sensual, erotic, hot. This time, the effect on me of the piece’s kaleidoscope movement (and throbbing rhythm that pushes and pushes but never quite breaks), of the physical presence of its performers, bodies trim, elegant, confident, crossing and re-crossing each other’s paths – had me experiencing raw power, pushing desire, a display of the power of sex.
Whether the change is because practice has perfected the Ballet’s performance energy in a particular direction since I last saw the piece or because I was the first time in a different mood than today, I can’t really know but I think not.
I analyze the change like this: the first time I experienced Ballet performers as focused outside themselves, focused on the effect of the kaleidoscope movement on spectators. This second time, though, I felt them focused inside, absorbed (but not self-absorbed) in their individual movement (as a power train to the performance).
In that inside focus they fell into the physical display of power, a posture of provocation, much like the sensibility a spectator is meant to experience on seeing parading soldiers.
It could be an accident. Surely, part of the power display posture is the way human DNA is folded – hard-wired threat display behaviors etched in the limbic system – part is culture – Louis XIV founded France’s first dance academy to improve martial elegance as well as actual prowess – part is (esthetic) situation – drum majorettes with rhinestone batons tossing and twirling the length of the football field are the same model as marines marching on order of arms with M-16s. I’ve done it myself, the power display mode is easy to get into and the closest one will ever get with a rifle to an involuntary orgasm.
But that doesn’t mean that the existence of a baked-in movement condemns a mover to a display of power posture. In dance performance, I think, posture is an artistic choice, or it can be, or it should be. Experiencing Static Shot as a power display made a difference for me as a spectator both in terms of immediate experience and in terms of the sensibility and imagination I carry away from the piece.
Becoming aware of the display changed my physical experience in the same way that “Get outta th’ fuckin’car, motherfucker” as opposed to “Please step away from your vehicle, Sir” changes subsequent physical experience with a police patrol. If, for the first performance I felt I was swaying along in some nightclub full of hot men and women, for this second, I felt “pinned down breathless” in my seat.
And then, my experience of Static Shot as a dance performance, as a vehicle to bring me into a sensibility and an un-narrative space, changed enormously. The first time I saw Static Shot, I experienced engagement in a strong, sexy group process. The second time, I felt a witness, maybe even a bit of a victim, to the power of sex.
Finally, the double experience of Static Shot reminds me of just how much choreography, and performer interpretation of choreographic intention, shape performer energy (as opposed to performer movement) and just how much that energy affects both performer and spectator experience.
“Malón”, Opéra de Lorraine, 23 May 2024, premier. Photo © Laurent Philippe, Divergence Images
Specifically, focus – which is not the same type of consciousness as attentiveness or concentration – can have as transforming an effect on spectator and performer experience in choreography as focus (“prioritization”) can have on business or commercial operation.
After Static Shot, which, in case you are in doubt after all this spilled ink, I enjoyed a lot, in both iterations. After this one, I was feeling particularly relaxed and easy, feeling, you might say, while picking my gold and jewelry up off the kitchen floor, disposed to sail toward the sun.
Ayelen Parolin writes in her dance note that in Malón she was looking to use the synergies of the Ballet de Lorraine troupe members to work on the notions of “pleasure, fun and letting go on the one hand and precision and rigor on the other…” . Serendipity: relaxed and easy was very good space to be in as Malón began. It’s also the natural framework for what Parolin’s quick, leisurely and multiple-layer piece delivered for me: the ordinary mystery of bodies as they move with other bodies, charmed laughter (from spectators) at performers’ efforts to use the body to find a place, make “contacts” into relationships.
With the Ballet’s 24 members in play, Malón is all the same much like her other, smaller-cast works I’ve seen: color, costume and space shaped by individuals and small groups. As stage time passes performers differentiate and evolve within the occupied space – that is, as the space relates to the people within it.
“Static Shot”, Opéra de Lorraine, 23 May 2024. Photo © Laurent Philippe, Divergence Images
Also, there’s more than a little Charlot in Parolin’s choreographic philosophy: in Malón, that’s an overstated title, “Malón” (essentially, “Chaos agents”), and a quite understated “cross-dressing” costuming point to an underlying absurdist view of people and world. Parolin’s ironic humor and choreographic style seem to me a perfect fit for Ballet de Lorraine, which, as I keep saying, is distinguished by an emphasis on performer individuation. And, indeed, for Malón,they are a good fit.
There’s a strong element of natural unpredictability in Parolin’s piece, “natural” because a human encounter is unpredictable – I learned afterwards that she had asked performers to improvise within her larger scheme. Improvisation as well as light clowning seemed to me often evident when performers leave the stage; in real life, goodbyes tend to sum up relationships. They seem to do so here.
The figures that came into my head as I watched were from Yellow Submarine, a sort of Monty-Python style Victorian take on things: a naïve sweetness in formulating the question, in seeking and finding possibilities.
Parolin’s chaos is about falling together, not falling apart. Her “cross-dressing”, if that’s what it is, seems to me to point not so much at turning gender (and so the world) topsy-turvy as turning spectators to the wider opportunities to look good that exist: Do you have shapely legs? Try this tutu. Does wonders! In fact, the advice on wearing a tutu rather sums up the un-narrative space Malón led me to: “Try some”.
As I mentioned in my earlier article, I feel obliged to say something about identity and Parolin’s new dance performance piece. I think that if there is in it an evidence of her grappling with identity, this is it: maybe an enhanced awareness of the grapple every human has with their body or, maybe, an enhanced awareness of how important personal identity is.
Ballet de Lorraine performers
Jonathan Archambault, Aline Aubert, Alexis Baudinet, Malou Bendrimia, Alexis Bourbeau, Charles Dalerci, Inès Depauw, Mila Endeweld, Angela Falk, Nathan Gracia, Inès Hadj-Rabah, Tristan Ihne, Matéo Lagière, Laure Lescoffy, Valérie Ly-Cuong, Andoni Martinez, Afonso Massano, Lorenzo Mattioli, Clarisse Mialet, Elsa Raymond, Elisa Rouchon, Céline Schoefs, Gabin Schoendorf, Lexane Turc, Luc Verbitzky, Mac Twining
Static Shot
Choreography: Maud Le Pladec, with Régis Bradel/Music: Chloé and Pete Harden /Sound: Vincent Le Meur/Lighting : Eric Soyer/ Costuming: Christelle Kocher – KOCHÉ, with Laure Mahéo and assistance from École de Broderie d’Art du lycée Paul-Lapie de Lunéville, France
Malón
Choreography: Ayelen Parolin, with Julie Bougard, Jeanne Colin and Daan Jaartsveld/Dramaturgy: Olivier Hespel/Lighting: Jean-Jacques Deneumoustier/ Sound and music: Benoist Esté Bouvot/ Costuming: Alexandra Sebbag with
Costumes du CCN - Ballet de Lorraine
Click for Ballet de Lorraine in Europe, Summer 2024