The National Choreographic Center (CCN) Ballet de Lorraine was created in 1978 with a dual mission: on one hand, to spread and renew the forms of classical ballet and contemporary repertoire, and on the other, to open up to creations by contemporary authors. Especially in the past three years, under the direction of Didier Deschamps, the French company based in Nancy has increased commissions to contemporary authors chosen both from the most renowned in the European scene and from within the company, focusing on the revival of significant works from the 20th-century repertoire. The two evenings that the Oriente Occidente Festival dedicates to the company this year are representative of this dual mission: the Loie Fuller Evening presents a triptych signed by interesting contemporary authors (Barcellos, Blumenthal, Béranger) who paid homage, according to their unique poetics, to the dancer of light loved by the futurists and Parisian poets of the early century; the second program, on the other hand, re-proposes four masterpieces in the history of 20th-century dance such as José Limón's La Pavane du Maure, Vaslav Nijinsky's L’Après-Midi d’un Faune, Merce Cunningham's Duets and Crises.
Since the CCN - Ballet de Lorraine is not, as mentioned, an entity exclusively centered on a single choreographer defining its artistic identity, but rather a tool at the service of many authors who offer the public the fruit of their research and their vision of the world, it is particularly interesting to see how three authors with very different stylistic approaches have interpreted Loie Fuller. Marcia Barcellos was a student of Alvin Nikolais before founding the Système Castafiore company and developing a choreographic universe that draws on multimedia, fanciful abstraction, and 'comic book' aesthetics. Her L.F.O. - Low Frequency Oscillator created for the Ballet de Lorraine is a work that overturns the vision of colors, movement, and light in a form of experimental intoxication realized through a lighting device made of projections randomly produced by a computer system that ranges in an infinite variety of luminous combinations, interacting with the choreography and dressing the dancer in a second skin.
