POSTPONED

Friday and Saturday, June 5 and 6, 8:00 pm

Requiem pour L.
Fabrizio Cassol and Alain Platel

Sunday, June 7, 2:00pm

Free Program for the Whole Family: a music workshop with musician and composer Fabrizio Cassol

Don’t look for ballet from Les Ballets C de la B. The internationally acclaimed Belgian dance company delivers bold and vigorous physical theatre that embodies an eclectic, unclassifiable mix of styles and media that gives perfect expression to its credo: “This dance is enshrined in the world, and the world belongs to us all.”

© Chris Van der Burght

With Requiem pour L., director Alain Platel and composer Fabrizio Cassol transform Mozart’s Requiem in D minor for our current moment, respecting the work’s classical origins while interweaving elements of jazz, opera, Indian, and African popular music. Led by a Congolese artist-musician Rodriguez Vangama, the ensemble of fifteen instrumentalists and singers trace an emotional gamut that begins in grief and mourning, then rises through meditation to a crescendo of joyous exaltation. Cassol and Platel’s new Requiem is living proof of their conviction that hidden within every masterpiece are revelations for future ages.

The vast array of influences to be found in Requiem for L. includes Pygmy, Malian, and Indian traditions, and Latin and African texts sung in a variety of operatic, polyphonic, and choral styles, accompanied by virtuoso accordion, electric guitar, euphonium, likembe (thumb piano) and percussion. The singers and instrumentalists, all male except for operatic soprano Nobulumko Mngxekeza, perform double duty as electrifying dancers. Alain Platel’s choreography is inspired, and when the performers move, stepping and shimmying with liquid hips and shoulders and fluttery convolutions of arm and wrist, the emotion rippling through their bodies mesmerizes the spectators. As one critic observed about another Platel dance piece, the cast “dance with such authenticity and conviction that performative contrivance seems to fall away.”

This is the fourth collaboration between Platel, Belgium’s genre-defying founder of Les Ballets C de la B, and composer and musician Fabrizio Cassol. The pair inhabit the space where métissages, the intermixing or blending of cultures, create new imaginative universes. Their earlier joint efforts include Monteverdi’s Vespers for the Blessed Virgin (vsprs, 2006), Bach’s St Matthew Passion (pitié!, 2008) and the western baroque repertoire (Coup Fatal, 2014).