CASTOR ET POLLUX • OPERA GARNIER PARIS
★★★☆☆☆
Photo: Vincent Pontet
REVIEW CASTOR ET POLLUX: WILD CLASH OF FLEX DANCE AND BAROQUE
Colorful American director Peter Sellars has staged French composer Rameau’s somewhat forgotten Baroque opera Castor et Pollux in an unusual clash of Flex-dance, sad ghetto violence and galactic giant projections of astronomical beauty.
The result is both spectacular and thought-provoking. Throughout the performance, a skilful cast of singers is fronted by 14 dancers in street-style Flex choreographies that illustrate everything from fear, frustration and death to suffering, love and brutal fights in a series of different tableaus over 5 acts.
Photo: Vincent Pontet
Flexing is a street dance style from Brooklyn, New York, characterized by its own vocabulary and rhythmic use of elements such as pauzN, connectN, GlidN, Getlow and Bonebreaking. Together with baroque opera, it creates wild images when the state of mind of the opera characters is transformed into modern dance.
The dancing, singing and music are set against giant projections of the unfathomable outer space spectacle you may recognize from the James Webb Space Telescope’s astonishing photos of dancing galaxies released by NASA a year ago.
Photo: Vincent Pontet
The twin brothers Castor and Pollux are characters in Greek/Roman mythology. The rather complex myth of the two siblings is about brotherly love and sacrifice.
Castor is killed in battle. Pollux decides to sacrifice himself to bring Castor back to life by swapping places with him in the underworld.
The scene shifts to the underworld where Pollux finds Castor, who is reluctant to return to life as he doesn’t want Pollux to die in his place. Zeus rewards the brothers’ loyalty and immortalizes them both by installing them in the sky as the constellation Gemini. Both are also in love with a Spartan princess, who also has a stake in the somewhat nebulous plot.
In Peter Sellar’s hard-to-read version, the opera has become a kind of star dance for peace with a point like John Lennon’s Imagine. When will we stop fighting over national borders and become a global, universal people? As political developments unfold, the question is urgent to say the least.
The set design is simple and rather ugly with just a few set pieces from modern life. A shower with a plastic curtain, a red sofa, a cheap kitchen and an iron bed.
Photo: Vincent Pontet
Spacy or not. This Opera doesn’t run at the speed of light. Even in hyped Greek/Russian conductor Teodor Currentzi’s highly acclaimed reading, Rameau’s beautiful baroque music can seem long after barely four hours. However, Parisian audiences are wildly enthusiastic in the sold-out Opera Garnier. If you want to delve further into Currentzis, listen to his 2015 album The Sound of Light, which is dedicated to Rameau.
Photo: Vincent Pontet
I have a hard time with this performance, which I found original and at times beautiful – but also unusually long-winded in its new-age naivety. A little more grounding would have been desirable, and we land on three stars from GOT TO SEE THIS
