Marlene Monteiro Freitas Bacchantes - prélude pour une purge

[Dance]

Bacchantes – prélude pour une purge, a polyphonic stage experience, combines snatches of text from the myth of Euripides with grotesque, fantastical carnival-like elements, and uses them as the basis for an opera of the monstrous, joyous kind. In this piece by Marlene Monteiro Freitas, the thirteen performers recount and breathe new life into the Dionysian ritual, as well as its links with the origins of tragedy.

In this piece of ‘total theatre’, an opera of bodies and sensations, Marlene Monteiro Freitas summons up myths and ghosts and turns them into a macabre dance. In Bacchantes – prélude pour une purge music, dance and mystery take us along a knife-edge journey polarised by the respective realms of Apollo and Dionysos, and in which a war of appearances and deceit is being waged. The fantastical elements are made possible via the graceful movements of the half-human, half-animal figures. Here Marlene Monteiro Freitas’s penchant for hybridisation is taken to new heights, whether it be a dada-ist fanfare, a carnival-inspired ballet, or a weird and wonderful incursion into a military-like world… all of this, and more, are present in Bacchantes. Using the work by Euripides as the driving force behind the piece, the choreographer treats us to a bewildering catalogue of metamorphoses. Last but not least, in the company of her thirteen performers, Marlene Monteiro Freitas’s Bacchantes provides us with a magnificent homage to the art of the troupe.