Equi Voci

Thierry De Mey

2009

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Le Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, to Claude Debussy’s music, inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s text, is a sublime musical poem about the ephemeral, absence, and extinction.

A faun wonders whether the nymphs that have fled his amorous advances were not, after all, mere phantasms : was I in love with a dream?...If only one could make these nymphs last, make the ephemeral persist, seize hold of what is bound to vanish…

Our idea is to confront Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreography, brought to life by two “dream” performers, Marc Lorimer and Cynthia Loemij, with the harshness of the scene of a catastrophe : the site of a vanishing sea, the Aral Sea.

An androgynous “faun” (made possible by switching between a man and a woman) becomes caught up in the impossible quest to hold on to what is bound to vanish. He/she traces the movements of his/her insatiability, wandering in the tracks left by what used to be a sea : a salty steppe, landscapes with cracked soil, sandstorms, a cemetery of the wrecks of ships, lighthouses in the middle of the desert, ghost villages covered in sand by the wind.

When he finally finds today’s shore, in the film’s final shot, the image of the sea in turn disappears, gradually dissolving in white.

 

 

Conception and images : Thierry De Mey

Music : Claude Debussy

Interprétation : Brussels Philharmonic - Vlaams Radio Orkest

Direction : Michel Tabachnik

Choreography : Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

Performers : Cynthia Loemij, Mark Lorimer

Computer engineering : Christophe Lebreton (Grame) and Xavier Meeus (Charleroi/Danses)

Duration : 20’

 

 

Production Charleroi/Danses, Centre chorégraphique de la Communauté française de Belgique. Coproduction Cie Rosas | Flagey, Bruxelles | La Cité de la musique, Paris | Eroïca Productions, Centre de l’Audiovisuel à Bruxelles (CBA). Avec la collaboration du Grame, centre national de création musicale à Lyon, et le soutien de l’Ambassade de Belgique à Astana, de l’AWEX Agence wallonne à l'Exportation et aux Investissements Etrangers, de Wallonie-Bruxelles International (Département Inde, Russie et C.E.I).

This, originally, was a commission from Rouen Opera. The figure obligatory, the field of action designated ; to translate into images the world of Charles Perrault’s folk-tales of Mother Goose (“Ma Mère l’Oye”). For Thierry De Mey, the experience led to the unsuspected discovery of Maurice Ravel’s world. A superb artisan of tone-colour, a so-called impressionist yet unfailingly rigourous goldsmith. To work in his wake, to wear down the paths taken by him, became a sensorial and perhaps also a spiritual experience. It was taking the measure of the absolute luxuriance of the composer’s world.

 

To start off with, a film score for orchestra, broad and porous, unfolding at times like a diptych, now like a video triptych. A fairy-tale cinematographic work in a dream world, “Ma Mère l’Oye” involves some sixty dancers and choreographers in the phantasmagorical world of the forests of Brussels and Salzburg. All portray in sensitive and unexpected manner a mythological creature or fairy-tale character, a personal reincarnation by which the ineffable individual more readily presents itself to the camera.

 

 

Conception and images : Thierry De Mey

Music : Maurice Ravel

Performers : Samir Akika, Iris Bouche, Jonathan Burrows, Annabelle Chambon,

Cédric Charron, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Michèle Anne De Mey, Cristian Duarte, Pascale Gigon, Shani Granot, Etienne Guilloteau, Thomas Hauert, Radek Hewelt, Damien Jalet, Tijen Lawton, Brice Leroux, Marion Levy, Kate Mc Intosh, Lieve Meeusen, Erna Omarsdottir, Mauro Paccagnella, Igor Paszkiewicz, Manuela Rastaldi, Efrat Rubin, Riina Saastamoinen, … & co

Images : Aliocha Van Der Avoort et Thierry De Mey

Editing : Boris Van Der Avoort et Isabelle Boyer

Production : Léonard de Vinci / Opéra de Rouen

Executive production : asbl Eroïca production

Computer engineering : Christophe Lebreton (Grame) en Xavier Meeus (Charleroi/Danses)

Duration : 28’

 

Production Eroïca Productions in co-production with ZDF/ARTE with the support of Charleroi/Danses, Centre chorégraphique de la Communauté française de Belgique, and the collaboration of Grame, centre national de création musicale / Lyon.

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