Choreography by
Angelin Preljocaj
Music by
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Sound
composition by
Goran Vejvoda
Design by
Thierry Leproust
Costumes by
Herve Pierre
Orchestra
conducted by
Koen Kessels
Pianist
Elena Bonnay
Stars of the
Paris Opera Ballet
Aurelie Dupont
and Laurent Hilaire
Members of the Paris Opera Ballet
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Le Parc
Paris Opera Ballet
Sadler's Wells
14 - 16 October 2005
Angelin Preljocaj's 'Le Parc' is about men and women encountering each other erotically; it is an essay on desire and the game of resistance and courtship, ardour and acceptance, and finally abandonment. It takes place in a park where a somewhat menacing set of four gardeners provide a modernistic framework to the eighteenth century playing-out of the erotic game.
The drama unfolds in three acts without intermission. Preljocaj's choreography is witty, imaginative, and sometimes breathtaking - but it also occasionally lapses into bad visual taste and moments of sheer banality. He needs someone with a good eye to sit beside him and say 'no' when bathos descends for a moment. But the lapses indeed only last for a moment, even if they come every ten minutes or so, and for the most part 'Le Parc' is a marvellously effective piece of abstract dance theatre.
By far the best thing about it is the presence on stage of two superlative dancers, whom it is a treat and a privilege to see: Aurelie Dupont and Laurent Hilaire. There are not adjectives of praise enough to applaud the vigorous, risk-taking, utterly absorbed commitment of these two dancers to what they are doing, nor to capture the skill they do it with. Hilaire was a gymnast before he was a dancer, and although he is approaching the age at which the Opera Ballet asks its male dancers to retire, he is as strong and agile as ever, with a deeply masculine presence on stage, and an undiminished virile quality of attack in every gesture.
Aurelie Dupont is as ravishing a dancer as she is a woman. In this role she is incandescent with the emotions she is asked to explore. She is fearless in accepting the physical demands made of her. At times she and Hilaire seem to be engaged in a form of combat, at other times in a game of shadows and evasions, at yet others in a tigerish frenzy of desire. It makes thrilling watching, and it is hard to see how dancers who lacked the animal quality of these two, with their feral earthiness and energy, could carry the thrust of the tale they tell quite so well.
The mixture of Mozart and specifically composed sound, the latter most closely connected with the gardeners who start, sustain and end the whole, adds to the sense of framing, so garden, gardeners and sound serve as a proscenium for the unfolding theatre of passion within. Like love and sex itself, there are funny episodes and absurd ones intermitting the dance; but the garden's mood can change instantly from light to dark as the thick force of passion pours through it, sweeping the dancers away. Between them, Preljocaj's choreography and the sheer power of the performance given by this pair of stars make 'Le Parc' a fragment of art.
AC Grayling
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