Let's start again from West Side Story. The chameleonic talents of French dance and its protagonists are surprising: yesterday, Josette Baïz was a champion of nouvelle danse, a dancer with Jean-Claude Gallotta, and later the head of her own company, La Place Blanche, where she created about thirty shows shaped in the Franco-American style of the 1980s. Today, she directs a new company and particularly a group, Grenade, born in the early 1990s from a series of courses and workshops in Aix-en-Provence that helped convert her to the causes of social aggregation, multiethnic encounters, and cultural exchange. Over ten years of work, Baïz has succeeded in building a complete métissage that includes not only street dances, prevailing hip hop, and ethnic dances, but also various contemporary techniques and even ballet.
From the always dynamic Grenade Group emerged a company in 1998, the group's flagship, composed of fourteen dancers (eight girls and six boys). The continuous exchange between Baïz's experience and technical rigor and the multiethnic effervescence of the performers has allowed the conquest of a personal style intertwining Asian and Arab dances, hip hop, and classical forms, always leaving ample space for each dancer's invention and creativity.
"Tonight!", the fifth show of Compagnie Grenade, premiered in March 2004 at the Scène Nationale de Narbonne. As its title suggests, it takes its starting point from one of the most famous songs of the musical "West Side Story." This hit from late 1950s Broadway, created by Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein, captures the feline strength and burning passion of movements (anyone who has forgotten the danced battles of the Jets and Sharks, raise your hand!) that once again arise from racial conflicts between rival gangs.
It begins in a playful and festive atmosphere that gradually evolves towards tragedy, with moments of sweetness and intimate, touching poetry well contrasted with the turmoil and rapidity of group movements. A metal scaffolding, placed at the back of the stage, is not mere scenery but a lived-in space that accentuates the contrasts between low and high; it serves to ascend to the sky and to throw oneself into emptiness, replacing psychology from which the performers escape with a kind of "physical symbolism," where the fall, for example, symbolizes an unrealizable dream that shatters.
The music, specially created by Marc Artières, Alain Bordes, and Yves Miara, is technological and forges a contemporary sound environment that contrasts with Bernstein's well-known rhythmic excerpts. Finally, the choice of this title for fourteen dancers with a strikingly "current" appearance appears anything but fortuitous: with this sort of new West Side Story - as the musical itself was originally a remake, a reimagining of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet - Josette Baïz aims to compare the original play's protagonists with the young interpreters of Compagnie Grenade, directly engaging with the fierce urban contrasts, especially those of the French banlieues, suspended in a timeless time that has not yet dissolved, nor seems willing to dissolve, its negative energies and contradictions, but rather sharpens them.
