Sorour Darabi, DEEPDAWN
One Thousand and One Nights
octoberoct 16 – 19
© Herwig Scherabon ©
Wednesday october 16
19h00
Thursday october 17
19h00
Friday october 18
19h00
Saturday october 19
20h00
Choreography, conception and artistic direction Sorour Darabi. Performers, singer, actors and live musician Aimilios Arapoglou, Li-Yun Hu, Felipe Faria, Lara Chanel, Sorour Darabi, Pablo Altar, Florian Le Prisé, Ange Halliwell. Musical composition Pablo Altar, Florian Le Prisé. Vocal coach Henry Browne. Lighting design Shaly Lopez, Dani Paiva de Miranda. Set design Alicia Zaton based on an original idea by Sorour Darabi. Costumes Anousha Mohtashami. English-Persian copywriter and curator (POETIC SOCIETIES, Crafted Conseil Remote Residency Program) Ava Ansari. Production and tour management Jenny Suarez. Administration management Martin Buisson.
Exclusive production DEEPDAWN – Sorour Darabi
Coproduction Festival Montpellier Danse ; CCN Ballet national de Marseille ; Arsenic – Centre d’art scénique contemporain (Lausanne) ; La Villette ; CND Centre national de la danse ; Tanzquartier Wien GmbH ; Fonds franco-allemand Transfabrik pour le spectacle vivant ; Charleroi danse – Centre chorégraphique de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles ; Festival Theaterformen (Hanover) ; Festival d’Automne à Paris
With the support of the Manutention du Palais de Tokyo ; CND Centre national de la danse ; Trauma Bar und Kino (Berlin) ; Tanzhaus Zürich ; PACT Zollverein (Essen) ; KWP Kunstenwerkplaats (Brussels) ; POETIC SOCIETIES (Detroit)
With the support of the Drac Île-de-France – ministère de la Culture
Acknowledgements Palmina D’Ascoli, David Lopez, Thomas Gachet
La Villette, the CND Centre national de la danse and the Festival d’Automne à Paris are co-producers of this show and present it as a co-realisation.
Sorour Darabi, the Iranian choreographer, who has been living in France since 2013, unveils his first opera, an ambulatory performance which enables voices marginalized by ancient myths to be heard. It is a piece devised by and for committed bodies.
One Thousand and One Nights revisits the notion of night or night-time through the eyes of Scheherazade. The original work, conceived by a heterosexual cis-gender man, has often been criticized for relegating the character of Scheherazade to the status of a narrative instrument, plunging her body, desires and subjectivity into the shadowy confines of fairy tales. For Sorour Darabi, the night is not just a simple metaphor for inventing tales. Indeed it is a space in which the true essence of Scheherazade can finally flourish as a queer myth, far from the constraints imposed by a cis-heteronormative world. One Thousand and One Nights explores an aesthetic of the transgender voice. For most trans people, hormone treatments induce a transformation of the voice, affecting where the sound is placed in the vocal cords. One Thousand and One Nights brings this fragility to the stage, by viewing the voice as an affective landscape. This an emancipatory opera for the 21st century in which new aesthetics and thoughts are voiced. Only then can we build another, different, relationship with the world, which resonates into the depths of the night.
In the same place
Trilogie Cadela Força I Chapitre I – A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela
Like descending into the darkest depths of hell, Carolina Bianchi exposes the unspeakable horror of sexist violence, plunging us into a median space in which all memory becomes blurred. Following in the footsteps of the artist Pippa Bacca, she uses her own body for the purposes of the piece, thereby anchoring herself in the history of feminist performance, and casting a critical gaze upon it at the same time.
Theo Mercier Skinless
Brought to the stage by visual artist Théo Mercier, Skinless is a disenchanted Eden built on a landscape of rubbish. Amidst this XXL end-of-the-world panorama, an out of the ordinary couple loves and tears each other apart under the watchful eye of a tragic observer.
Romeo Castellucci, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gustav Mahler Symphonie No. 2 “Résurrection”
Directed by Romeo Castellucci, Gustav Mahler's Resurrection symphony seems to take on all its tragic grandeur. Masterfully conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Italian director magnifies this monumental work in order bring us a funereal “song of the earth” from which nobody emerges unscathed.
Marlene Monteiro Freitas, Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon Canine Jaunâtre 3
Following on from the Portrait dedicated to her by the Autumn Festival two years ago, Marlene Monteiro Freitas hijacks the match: twenty-five virtuoso performers, each wearing the same number 3 vests, throw the score into disarray, measure themselves against the grotesque and warp the game. This show sees the eccentric choreographer passing on to the Lyon Opera Ballet a jousting match of hybrid times, a carnivalesque fresco in which the human, animal and machine have a tendency to merge.