The French choreographer and dancer Lara Barsacq triumphs in Europe with a feminist revision of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The one who was part of Batsheva – and whom Ohad Naharin encouraged to choreograph – debuts this week at the Mercat de les Flors with two pieces that arise from her concern to delve into choreographic archives and confront them with current events.
These January 25 and 26 he brings to the Barcelona theater La Grande Nymphe, a piece in which he questions the erotic view of the female body represented by Claude Debussy in Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894), when, Inspired by Mallarmé’s poem, it composes an erotic rhythm that responds to the coming and going of the nymph appearing and disappearing. An idea built by and for the male gaze.
That warm, dreamy and sensual afternoon that Nijinski made famous on stage a century ago, Barsacq now dances with Diaghilev’s troupe together with Marta Capaccioli, turning it into a hymn to the freedom of the body. How would you express yourself if you were alien to the atavistic sexual imagination?
All this feminine appropriation of the Prelude, with the dance of the faun and the sensuality of the nymph, is produced with the electronic decomposition of Cate Hortl, which at times turns the score into something dark, until at the end a classical flute trio appears, harp and cello and perform the Debussy piece.
The French creator’s interest in Les Ballets Russes came from her paternal grandmother, whose uncle was Léon Bakst, a painter, decorator and costume designer for Diaghiev’s company. As a healing ritual and to say goodbye to her father, whom she had lost as a child, Barsacq presented Lost in Ballet Russes five years ago. There she investigated the avant-garde impudence of the dancer Ida Rubinstein, a provocateur from the early 20th century who stripped naked in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. Barsacq says that she grew up seeing a poster with her effigy in the kitchen of her house. “These paintings made me dance!”, she has stated, about the pictographic archives in which she immersed herself.
Images but also criticisms, which were sometimes directly anti-Semitic texts about Ida Rubinstein or clear examples of the misogyny of the time, when they refer to Bronislava Nijinska, calling her ugly. “During the creative process I invite the dancers to dialogue with some archives so that they imagine what dance or ritual could have existed, what factors generate creativity when we observe them,” indicated the French creator.
For La Grande Nymphe he worked both on Mallarmé’s poem The Afternoon of a Faun, as well as on Debussy’s Prelude and Nijinski’s scandalous erotic dance, which at the time caused a stir among the audiences of European opera coliseums. On stage, she and Capaccioli imagine themselves as great nymphs, but “we meet our aging bodies, our humor, and we play with these discrepancies.” They also use desire between women in an uninhibited way, to “decompartmentalize erotic imaginations.” It was about, she says, investigating how someone is reconstructed with another perspective.
On the weekend (27th and 28th) it will also be seen at the Mercat Fruit Tree, where it continues with its tribute to undervalued female creators of the time, to rehabilitate them. In this case the choreographer Bronislava Nijinska, who devised the dance for Les noces with music by Igor Stravinsky.