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.
Bud Blumenthal comes from American contact improvisation, having worked in Belgium with Frédéric Flamand and Michèle Noiret before turning to choreography in 1990. His research develops in close relation to video, which often is the dominant scenographic element of his works. His homage to Fuller is titled Phantom Limbic and seeks a synthesis between the three-dimensional stage space - on which the dancers perform - and an illusory juxtaposed three-dimensional context created by the computer. Just as Fuller, who was inspired by the figure of the ghost for her light plays created with the movement of the large dresses worn, so Blumenthal re-proposes his idea of a sensory ghost fed by synesthesia, immersed in a hypnotic and undulating sound atmosphere.
