Sinfonia Eroica Number Two
We remember the Belgian Michèle Anne De Mey, author of Sinfonia Eroica Number Two, in the 1980s when she, light but far from fragile, evolved in the magnificent Fase: a minimalist and repetitive duet by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.
It was 1982, and Michèle was the blonde and sunny alter ego of the introverted and dark-haired Anne Teresa, with whom she would remain close for a long time, also to enhance the artistic relationships between De Keersmaeker and Thierry De Mey, her already famous musician brother. In the meantime, she – who, like Anne Teresa and our Adriana Borriello, had trained at Mudra in Brussels under Maurice Béjart – had also attempted her first choreographies.
Passé Simple, Ballatum, Face à Face (the latter from 1986) enjoyed some success, although at the time it was still difficult to distinguish her choreographic signature from that of her friend, road companion, and leader of the all-female Rosas group. Then came the opportunity for a true artistic detachment when, in 1990, Michèle decided to immerse herself in a monument of Beethovenian music like the Sinfonia Eroica to explore its secrets. She did so with such passion and rigor (under the watchful eye of Thierry) that she earned applause for herself and the six dancers she had assembled, which she decided not to waste. Thus, in the same year, she founded her company and began to sail with the wind at her back. In the milieu of Belgian and Flemish dance, increasingly crowded with choreographers from diverse disciplines, a choreographer with a clear and strong dance style emerged, tinged with evocative, if not narrative, nuances, and with an impalpable grace and irony, characteristics perhaps more French than Belgian. Of the fifteen creations made in ten years of activity, including Chateaux en Espagne (1991), Cahier (1995), Pulcinella and Love Sonnets (1994), Utopie (2001), and Raining Dogs (2002), some, like Love Sonnets, 21 Études à Danser, and the old Face à Face, were transformed into films just as the choreographer, always attentive to the relationship with music, began and developed a pedagogical work (in Amsterdam, at the Inals in Brussels, and at the CNDC in Angers), culminating in a creative workshop for children and, in three years, in the realization of Sacre en Couleurs for Brussels/Brussel 2000. Michèle's pedagogical activity must have helped purify her work, making it simpler and more direct, like the delightfully simple and direct 12 Easy Waltzes, which she created and danced with Grégory Grosjean in 2005 at Charleroi/Danses, the Centre Chorégraphique de la Communauté française, of which she has since become co-director. But now Michèle Anne De Mey has retraced her steps, as often happens with choreographers: she has revived Sinfonia Eroica, created sixteen years ago, with a new group of dancers to revisit, she says, "the same path as then, without the concern of updating it."
Why did she do it? Primarily, she says, because Sinfonia Eroica "represents" her more than any other show she has created, because it epitomizes her way of approaching music with dramaturgy and sliding from pure movement to evocation; because it highlights the transition from joy to pain, from dance to immobility. Finally, because "that show radiated a particular energy from the group to the stage, an almost magical innocence and lightness that I wanted to try to rediscover."
But let's get to the facts.
Sinfonia Eroica is based on Beethoven's Third Symphony, the Eroica (1803), and the dance lines marry the musical lines of the Bonn musician's masterpiece, but not only. The choreographer (with Thierry De Mey's collaboration) juxtaposed this Beethoven with a youthful Singspiel by Mozart, Bastiano e Bastiana, and extracted the overture, which is taken up as a leitmotif, also considering its libretto: that is, the suffering of the shepherdess Bastiana, who asks the wizard Colas to intervene to stem Bastiano's flight from the pastoral idyll, obtaining from him a magical ceremony that reunites her with her beloved. Naturally, De Mey did not follow Rousseau's famous parody Devin du Village, which Mozart composed in 1758, to the letter, but was inspired by its musical themes and the dialogues of Bastiano and Bastiana to evoke the eternal relationship of seduction between man and woman, the eternal carousel of union and separation, and the intervention of a "third party," which is no longer the Mozartian wizard but the outsider, the traveler, indeed the hero of the moment who opposes the group and "saves" it. The figure of the hero is treated in a literal sense and fittingly for the Eroica – which, as is well known, was initially dedicated to Bonaparte – but also in the antinomy of the anti-hero who does not save others but himself by enduring the banality of everyday life. Thus, public heroes and private anti-heroes move in this joyful show of dissolving loves, even in the scenic arrangement, where one often moves from the vertigo of height to the fluidity of water. The intervention of a paso doble, bullfighting music, and a guitar riff by Jimi Hendrix serves to demystify the pomp of heroism and its triumphal marches with graceful distance and perhaps to warn us against the great ideals regularly defeated in the turmoil of life.
