Marlene Monteiro Freitas Bacchantes – prélude pour une purge

[Dance]

Marlene Monteiro Freitas’s productions are of the no holds barred variety, and European stages cannot get enough of them. This time around, the young Cape Verdian choreographer with a passion for the mysterious and untamed emotion, embarks thirteen dancers on an intense bacchanal inspired by Euripides. In it, the human being finds itself torn between reason and madness.
Bacchantes – prélude pour une purge is the first time that Marlene Monteiro Freitas embarks on a project of this scale. Those who are familiar with the work of this young choreographer, and her avowed fascination for the strangeness and transgressive nature of the street carnival, will not be surprised to see her delving into this work by Euripides. After training with Teresa De Keersmaeker, in Brussels, and at the Fondation Gulbenkian, in Lisbon, she danced, among others, for Emmanuelle Huynh, Loïc Touzé and Boris Charmatz, before collaborating with François Chaignaud and Cecilia Bengolea. From 2010 onwards, she then began embarking on her own projects (Jaguar, De marfim e carne…, Paraiso, Guintche…). Impurity, animality and the expression of raw emotions are at the core of her preceding works. Here, once again, her Bacchae are a mixture of moving, colliding moving bodies, madness and turmoil. The human psyche finds itself succumbing to contradictory influences, torn between Apollo’s harmonious, rational side and Dionysus’s wild, instinctive side. In the hands of the choreographer, this detour via Greek mythology does not, however, rule out the possibility of dance. Far from it. As in all her productions, the moving bodies of her dancers enable us to stare the chaos of the contemporary world straight in the face.