At two-thirds, the lump shoots in to not go out until the end. It happens at every Alain Platèl performance. Heartfelt sobs from the audience, lots of swallowing around you and the inevitable tears welling up like a natural disaster. To call the Flemish choreographer's work predictable for this reason is going too far. What he manages with his company Les Ballets C de la B is too pure for that. Every time again. So again now with C(h)oeurs, the opening performance of the 65th Holland Festival.
After Bach, Monteverdi, Mozart and an occasional slip with Celine Dion, Alain Platel went to work with Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner. Two composers of whom he did not think too highly of beforehand, partly because they are suspected of ruthless pursuit of effect. Commissioned by the Spanish Teatro Real, a monument of tradition, he was allowed to work with his own dancers and the opera house's choir and orchestra to find out where the common ground lies between him and the two great 19th-century composers.
Well: those common ground have been found, though it has to be said that they are mainly between Platel and Verdi: the truly megalomaniacal part of Wagner's work gets remarkably little attention in this performance about mass and passionate heartbreak. Although the 'Heil König' from the Lohengrin can hardly be called modest:
Excerpt from the Bayreuth version of Lohengrin:
Platel is always very interested in victims. One of the things he usually manages to hit the audience in the heart with as well. In this performance, where he puts the phenomenon of the 'masses' in both a positive and a negative framework, that victimhood ultimately comes crashing in. Under the slogan 'revolutions eat their own children', Platel shows us the extreme consequence of that metaphor. The show, which is already very clearly concerned with the similarities between football violence and the Arab Spring, suddenly shows us the aftermath of images we in the Netherlands were privileged to see only a week ago from Syria, where the warring parties do not shy away from infanticide.
Warning: The images below are shocking.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jffUNQw8Fl8&skipcontrinter=1
Solutions, the choreographer is not particularly concerned with, but he always manages to inject some form of solace into his theatre. That consolation can be drawn from the fact that he now lets the usually nameless members of the Madrid opera choir all play out their names and personalities. Their affectedness, but also their individualism, could be seen as a counterbalance to the mass violence in the music of Verdi and Wagner. This is even more apparent at the very end, when, behind the once-closed stage curtain, the release of tension in the chorus is audible in raucous enthusiastic cheers.
Rightly so, as the ovation the Holland Festival's opening audience had given them shortly before was long and passionate.
Earned.
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