Le Parc
RESTAGED IN 2027 WITH BALLET PRELJOCAJ / CREATED IN 1994 FOR PARIS OPERA BALLET
Video excerpt
With Le Parc, created in 1994 for the dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet, Angelin Preljocaj clear-mindedly probes the journeys taken by the passions and the war of the sexes.
Games of love, in a French garden
In search of what still remains of an ‘art of love’, Angelin Preljocaj visited the literature of the 17th and 18th centuries in France, which saw a blossoming of amorous codes and types of behaviour, from Platonic sublimation to libertinism. (...) In three acts, guided by music borrowed from Mozart (some of the most beautiful adagios from his piano concertos), the choreographer sets out his litt le theatre of amatory strategies, a cruel game of chess played with the passions, with the stakes being the birth of real love.
The setting of Le Parc is not really bucolic, and while to some extent it keeps the appearance of a garden for amorous frolics, of a maze encouraging metaphorical games of hide and seek over forbidden fruit, here nature is controlled, designed, precisely ‘unnatured’; (...) And in those inhospitable places, a quartet of gardeners – modern cupids in dark glasses (love is blind!) – lends rhythm to the mechanism of emotional confrontations: observing, tempting, desiring, rejecting. With their industrious assistance, the fortresses of pride will yield in the end, freeing up ardours too long repressed.
Text from Paris opera programme
"How is love doing, caught up in confusion and crisis, prey to doubt, faced with AIDS? How do emotional developments manifest themselves, what journey is travelled by the passions? If the capacity for resistance tends to heighten desire, it also appears that this wish to halt the advances of passion, while bending it in a particular way, boosts love still further. From The Princess of Cleves to Les liaisons dangereuses, via Melle de Scudéry’s Carte du Tendre, all of this literature has already come before us, in the sophisticated ritualisation of the torments of love, as if to escape the abyss of the ordinary and the everyday."
PRESS EXCERPTS
« Angelin Preljocaj has pulled off a masterstroke.»
Le Figaro, 1994
« Always beautiful, Le Parc can’t help but give pleasure.»
Ballet 2000, 1994
« Avec Le Parc, The dance is various, abundant, mixing – as few can do – the baroque and the classical, the postmodern and the figurative, the most stripped-down contemporary style and the most flamboyant emotion. »
La Provence, 1997
AUTOUR DU SPECTACLE
FILM AIR FRANCE
L’Envol (2011)
Direction and chorography – Angelin Preljocaj
Conception – Agence BETC Euro RSCG