Lucinda Childs
Maguy Marin
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker Trois Grandes Fugues

Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon

Here the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon will be giving audiences the opportunity to discover the resonances between three works from its repertory - all three of which are set to Grande Fugue op. 133 by Beethoven, and carry the signature of three of today’s foremost choreographers: Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Maguy Marin and Lucinda Childs. How does each of them set about tackling this whirlwind of string sounds, in which Beethoven pushes the art of the counterpoint to its maximum point of intensity? Using the same score, the same notes, audiences will be treated to a vast array of physical constructions, and relationships between moving bodies, either in unison or at odds with the unfurling rhythms and melody. These intimate differences make each version unique to the three choreographers. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker was the first, in 1992, to delve into this monumental work of instrumental music. Against the backdrop of Beethoven’s music, the version she conjures up is an austere one, tinged with her wish “to write a masculine, non-classical, and sexual vocabulary”, characterized by the motif of the fall or drop. Maguy Marin’s relationship to this “grand music” carries with it the imprint of liberty and fantasy. In keeping with her keen eye for the off-beat, her version confronts the Grand Fugue’s dark tonalities with a quartet of women dressed in red. In a bubbling, effervescent staging the dancers beat out the rhythm, leap, collapse, recover and contort their bodies. In a sort of inverse chronology, Lucinda Childs will be bringing proceedings to a close with this final Grande Fugue for twelve dancers divided into six couples, specially created for the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon. A pioneer in the relationship between dance and music - the minimalist rigour of which had a marked influence on the early works of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker set to the music of Steve Reich - Lucinda Childs demonstrates to what extent, almost thirty six years after Dance, she has lost none of her strength of invention.