Baroque fantasies hold the key to entering the delightful world of chimeras and mirages.

Our route through European baroque music navigates between vast excepts from Lully, Charpentier, Vivaldi and Purcell’s body of work. Such colour-contrasted pieces energize the suspended time of slumber to suggest an imaginary wandering path.

The nine dancers’ clear, luminous outlines are sometimes dressed in robes unfolding to amplify the movement as huge wings would, or in the contrary morphing their bodies into strange, captive chrysalides.
Songes questions the verticality of the baroque body and its resonating surroundings, occasionally giving it nightmarish, menacing overtones.

If dreaming means being on the moon, then let us take a trip and lay the sky on a vast painted ellipse through which the dancers shall move.
Let us play with mirror elements as well, fragmenting the fresco, giving it a new verticality, dividing it, shedding it of any remaining bit of reality it might still hold.

Such a project is built through tremendous team work, with the help of Rémi Nicolas, light and stage designer, Dominique Fabrègue, costume designer (both our accomplices in creating Que ma joie demeure), as well as Jean-Claude Malgoire at the helm of his musicians from La Grande Ecurie et la Chambre du Roy.
The first few performances shall be recorded, giving the show further visibility.

The troupe for Songes is made up of high level dancers, some of whom have been accompanying Fêtes Galantes in its creative work for a number of years. Here, too, our bonds are born from an ever-changing common language: baroque dance.

Together, we are building a collective dream—an ever-changing baroque dream for today which invites us to challenge our perceptions.

Béatrice Massin,    

After dancing for several contemporary companies, including that of Susan Buirge, Béatrice Massin was engaged by Ris et Danceries in 1983, where for the next ten years she mixed performing with repertoire research, assistantship and choreography. She choreographed “Water Music” by Handel at the Metz Arsenal (1990), “Bastien et Bastienne” (1991), Mozart's “Les Petits Riens” (1991) for the Tourcoing opera workshop and also devised the choreography for “Medée”, set to music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1983).

In late 1993, Béatrice Massin founded her own company, Fêtes Galantes, for whom she devises one show each year. These are reconstructions of pieces from the baroque repertoire, but, above all, creations using the choreographic vocabulary of the seventeenth century: "Charpentier des ténèbres”, “Carte du tender, “Pipinone”, “Trio triptyque” and most recently, “Que ma joie demeure”. From December 1999 to July 2000, Béatrice Massin devised and directed the choreography for Gérard Corbiau's film “Le roi danse”. In September 2001, Béatrice Massin was invited by the Ballet de Lorraine to devise three baroque choreographies, which include "Noir, du côté de Callot” inspired by Callot's etchings.

Alongside her research and choreographic work, she presents educational programmes at Opéra Bastille, the Cité de la Musique and CND (National Dance Centre) in the form of danced lecture-recitals, courses and workshops. She offers the opportunity to discover baroque court dance as well as reconstructions of pieces from the baroque repertoire.

Source : Website of the Compagnie Fetes galantes

Further information : Company Website

Digital Resource by the Médiathèque du Centre national de la danse

http://mediatheque.cnd.fr/spip.php?page=mediatheque-numerique-ressource&id=PHO00003922

Through the singularity of its work and the complementarity of its actions, the Fêtes galantes company aims to be, both nationally and internationally, a key player in the promotion and transmission of the French chographic heritage of the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as a place of production and contemporary creation resolutely turned towards the 21st century. Thus, his approach is at the point of singular balance of the creative forces of yesterday and today.  

Source: Fêtes Galantes