TERPSICORE (2024)
TERPSICORE – The Queen is dancing!
Contemporary dance meets Baroque
Premiere May, 25, 2024 Goethe-Theater Bad Lauchstädt
With the Lautten compagney BERLIN and the dance ensemble Emanuele Soavi incompany from Cologne, contemporary dance and baroque music come together as part of the Handel Festival. This forms the foil that pushes the dance into delimitation and resistingly frees it from any formal corset.
In terms of content, this is reflected in the examination of the first female choreographer in history, a woman who already knew in the 18th century the revolutionary potential of the dancing body: Marie Sallé. Her innovative strength and courage contributed significantly to freeing dance from the courtly social sphere and turning it into an independent stage art. Using unconventional means, she challenged the male-dominated world of dance and theater and fought for a new view to women in society.
How does the uncompromising breaking with convention, the resistance concerning representation of power, maintenance of power and expansion of power, initiate transformation processes? And what does this have to do with stereotypical forms of expression that every era, including the present, sets and sells as standards? Soavi is looking for answers, drawing up a kind of open “movement catalogue” based on Sallé’s dance composition techniques for Handel’s ‘Terpsicore’ – which he wrote for Sallé – as well as for music from various works by Jean-Philippe Rameau.
TERPSICORE celebrates dance and music, combines them into a magnificent game that has arrived in our present, giving space to the conflict between emotion and aesthetics, to irony, sarcasm and a socially critical view.
Choreography Emanuele Soavi
In collaboration with the dancers Federico Casadei, Taeyeon Kim, Lisa Kirsch, Lorenzo Molinaro, Joel Small
Singer Coline Dutilleul, Hanna Herfurtner
lautten compagney BERLIN
Musical direction Wolfgang Katschner
Set & Costume Raissa Kankelfitz
Photos Anna Kolata
Produced by Emanuele Soavi incompany and lautten compagney BERLIN
For Händel-Festspiele Halle
Funded by: Cultural Office of the City of Cologne
With the kind support of Ostdeutschen Sparkassenstiftung gemeinsam mit der Saalesparkasse sowie der Cie La Baraka – Abou Lagraa & Nawal Aït Benalla – creative residency La Chapelle Annonay