Fabrizio Cassol and Alain Platel / les ballets C de la B
| Music: | Fabrizio Cassol, a partir del Requiem de W. A. Mozart |
| Director: | Alain Platel |
| Music direction: | Rodríguez Vangama |
| Featuring: | Rodriguez Vangama (guitar and electric bass ), Boule Mpanya, Fredy Massamba and Russell Thsiebua (vocals), Nobulumko Mngxekeza, Owen Metsileng and Stephen Diaz / Rodrigo Ferreira (lyric vocals), Joao Barradas (accordion), Kojack Kossakamvwe (electric guitar), Niels Van Heertum (euphonium), Bouton Kalanda, Erick Ngoya and Silva Makengo (likembe) and Michel Seba (percussion) |
| Writing: | Hildegard De Vuyst |
| Music assistant: | Maribeth Diggle |
| Choreography assistant: | Quan Bui Ngoc |
| Video: | Simon Van Rompay |
| Camera: | Natan Rosseel |
| Stage design: | Alain Platel |
| Set building: | Wim Van de Cappelle and atelier NTGent |
| Lighting: | Carlo Bourguignon |
| Sound: | Carlo Thompson and Guillaume Desmet |
| Costume: | Dorine Demuynck |
| Stage manager: | Wim Van de Cappelle |
| Photographer: | Chris Van der Burght |
| Production managers: | Katrien Van Gysegem and Valerie Desmet |
| Assistant director and tour manager: | Steve De Schepper |
| Performing arts trainer: | Lisaboa Houbrechts |
| Theatre engineering trainer: | Ijf Boullet |
| Acknowledgements: | Isnelle da Silveira, Filip De Boeck, Barbara Raes, Griet Callewaert, atelier NTGent, Mevrouw S.P., Juffrouw A.C., Fondation Camargo (Cassis, France), Sylvain Cambreling and Connexion vzw. We express our sincere thanks to L. and her family for their exceptional sincerity, their deep confidence and their unique support to this special project |
| Production: | les ballets C de la B, Festival de Marseille and Berliner Festpiele |
| Co-production: | Opéra de Lille, Théâtre National de Chaillot Paris, Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, Onassis Cultural Centre Athens, Torinodanza Festival, Aperto Festival -Fondazione I Teatri di Reggio Emilia, Kampnagel Hamburg, Ludwigsburger Schlossfestspiele, Festspielhaus St. Pölten, L'Arsenal Metz, Scène Nationale du Sud-Aquitain – Bayonne and La Ville de Marseille-Opéra |
| Distribution: | Frans Brood Productions |
| Les ballets C de la B is supported by the Flemish authorities, the City of Ghent, the province of East Flanders, the North Sea port and the Belgian tax authorities | |
| Requiem pour L. is presented in collaboration with Teatros del Canal in Madrid | |
“Extremely intense and moving. Rarely has such a radical proposal been performed on stage”.El País
Lucie, an activist for the right to a death with dignity, faces her last moments of life after learning that she has an incurable cancer. Admirer of the work of Alain Platel, she asks the celebrated director and choreographer to record the last days of her life, as a new, intimate and radical gesture, to promote the legalisation of euthanasia.
The 37th Autumn Festival hosts this new collaboration between the creator of les ballets C de la B, Alain Platel, and the composer Fabrizio Cassol, whose creativity merges in an extraordinary spectacle of music and dance that creates a new universe by mixing cultures, as demonstrated in earlier collaborations: VSPRS (2006, inspired by Monteverdi's El Vespro della Beata Vergine), Pitié! (2008, which draws from Bach's St Matthew Passion) or Coup Fatal (2014).
In Requiem pour L., Platel and Cassol delve into death and funeral rites around the world with one of the most well-known funerary compositions, Mozart's Requiem in D minor. Cassol reinterprets this requiem mass through the eclectic influence of genres such as jazz, opera and African music. On the stage, 14 musicians from all over the world, accompanied by five lines of tombs of different sizes, blend these different styles with the Réquiem, creating a new universe of sound. On the screen, in black and white, is the depiction of Lucie's journey to voluntarily end her life. With true delicacy, poetically but also firmly, without hiding its crudity.
Requiem pour L. is a brilliant and moving artistic exercise that by its new musical, physical and visual interpretation, makes room for debate in the audience's minds who from their seats, view the recreation of the last days of Lucie, confronted by the celebration of death through the luminosity and vitality of African rhythms. After all, according to Platel, "Requiem pour L. is a celebration of life".
Founded by Alain Platel in 1984, les ballets C de la B is one of the most internationally famous contemporary dance companies. Faithful to its founding principles, artists from several disciplines and origins come together in a dynamic creative process, which results in a unique mix of different artistic visions that make it anarchic, eclectic, popular, and committed at the same time. Their motto is: "our dance is for the world, and the world is for all".