Terpsichore Unbound
Masturbating fauns, sexually unfulfilled nymphs and centuries of heteronormative eroticism – this and more in Lara Barsacq’s latest creation, an explosive investigation on the limits of male-depicted sexuality and female body’s objectification that ends up nourishing even more the political and imaginative horizon of feminism in performing arts.
On 22 December 1894, Claude Debussy’s symphonic poem Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune was first played in Paris by conductor Gustave Doret and quickly became one of the turning points in the history of Western classical music. The prelude, Debussy’s musical response to the written verses of Stephane Mallarmé (namely, L’après-midi d’un faune), was meant as an evocation of the feelings of the poesy in which a faun playing his pan-pipes alone in the woods becomes aroused by passing nymphs and naiads, pursues them unsuccessfully and then wearily abandons himself to a sleep filled with visions. In spite of its name, the composer’s work was nevertheless complete and due to its «extensive use of the tri-tone interval and whole-tone scale», which stretched the limits of tonality, it set up «the atonal works of the 20th century to come», as purported by American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein.
Some time after, on 29 May 1912, Russian ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky first performed his 12-minute ballet The Afternoon of a Faun in the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, causing quite the scandal in the French society of the time due to its “filthy” and “indecent” movements – which included an overtly erotic subtext and ended with the faun masturbating onto the main nymph’ fallen veils. In spite of the controversies stirred up by the premiere (which ended up involving the Russian ambassador, French politicians and even the President and Prime Minister in charge then), tickets to all shows were sold out and the piece came to be considered as one of the first examples of modern ballets, paving the way for the evolution of the genre.
More than a century later, following a life-long love affair with the Ballets Russes that began in her childhood (her paternal grandmother’s uncle was, after all, Léon Baskt, a painter, set and costume designer for the itinerant dance company) and continued throughout her career – leading to the personal projects Lost in Ballets Russes (2018), IDA don’t cry me love (2019) and Fruit Tree (2021) – French choreographer, dancer and actress Lara Barsacq comes back to the faun’s debauchery, but only to focus on the heteronormative, omnipresent male gaze that limited, shackled and objectified the figure of the Nymph (and of women in general) throughout the history of dance – and art. By mixing autobiographical, feminist and queer elements, Barsacq’s latest creation, La Grande Nymphe (which premiered on May 17 in Brussels’ La Raffinerie/Charleroi danse) questions «the eroticisation of the body», enacting «a sensual battle with tradition, for a new erotic imagery» aimed at deconstructing a representation of female corporeity assembled by and for men.
Sharing the stage with electro artist Cate Hortl and performer Marta Capaccioli, the former Batsheva Company dancer unfolds an inclusive and horizontal process of diachronic confrontation with the past, floating across space and time with luminous, chiselled motions that produce a kind of intensity, a dissonance charged with novelty that makes the piece dense, and then voltaic, and then persuasive. By offering three different takes on the Prelude, the three women (flanked by Léonore Frommlet’s concert flute, Wanying Emilie Koang’s cello and Alyssia Hondekijn’s harp) play with a motley crew of performative media and layers of substance, unclosing an interconnectedness of informality (which is not an absence of form, but that which gives form) that ranges from Federico Cervelli’s painting Jove under the guise of Diana and Callisto to garrulous, flirtatious confessions between scenes, adding up to the reclaiming of not only the body, but also of the structure of art.
Set ablaze with risqué lace tights, orgasmic sound distortions and angular, bas-relief like embraces, La Grande Nymphe’s unapologetic core burns like a minor sun, obliterating the limits of amorous imagination in an attempt to «free oneself from a pre-existing idea of sexuality». And indeed, hardly any offspring of Terpsichore was ever so erogenous, arousing and liberating as Barsacq and Capaccioli’s collisions between sex and sense: as their bodies tear each other to wholeness in a rhapsody of reciprocal pleasure hurled to the exhaustion of any objectification and idealisation, the man-made “woman” comes undone under the duo’s unquantifiable effervescence of aliveness and the nymph – together with her naiad sisters and their mistreated and exploited cousins, the muses – is finally unbound.
The show was played within 2023 Kunstenfestivaldesarts
La Raffinerie/Charleroi danse
rue de Manchester 21 Manchesterstraat – 1080, Molenbeek-Saint-Jean/Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Brussels
Wednesday 17 and Saturday 20 of May, 20:30
Thursday 18 of May, 16:00
Friday 19 of May, 22:00Kunstenfestivaldesarts and Charelroi danse presents
La Grande Nymphe
a project by Lara Barsacqcreation and performance Marta Capaccioli, Lara Barsacq, Cate Hortl, Léonore Frommlet, Wanying Emilie Koang, Alyssia Hondekijn
original music Cate Hortl
set design and costumes Sofie Durnez
light design Estelle Gautier
artistic advice Gaël Santisteva
video Gaël Santisteva, Lara Barsacq
video animation Katia Lecomte Mirsky
music Claude Debussy
stage management Emma Laroche
sound engineer Sammy Bichon
administration and production Myriam Chekhemani
communication and distribution Quentin Legrand, Rue Branly
production Gilbert & Stock
coproduction Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Charleroi danse – Centre Chorégraphique de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Théâtre de Liège, Les Brigittines, CCN de Caen en Normandie, CCN2 – Centre Chorégraphique National de Grenoble in the context of Accueil Studio
residencies Charleroi danse, Grand Studio, Les Brigittines, CCN de Caen en Normandie, CCN2 – Centre Chorégraphique National de Grenoble
with the support of Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles – Service de la danse
performances in Brussels with the support of the French Institute and the French Embassy in Belgium, in the frame of EXTRA
with the kind participation of Mrs Coralie Cadène, responsible for the costume heritage of the Opéra national de Paris
acknowledgements Astrid Vansteenkiste, Soledad Ballvé, Marion Sage, Sue-Yeon Youn, Marceline Bosquillon, Ivan-Vincent Massey, Benoit Pelé, Heide Vanderieck, Stéphane Barsacq, Julien Fournier, Soline Poteau, Jules Fournier, Belinda Mathieu, Erwan Ha Kyoon Larcher, Les Halles de Schaerbeek, Simon Thierrée, Fabienne Aucant, Daniel Blanga Gubbay, Frédéric Jamagne, Philippe de Lustrac, Erwan Hakyoon Larcher, Stanislav Dobakph. Sybille Cornet
