At the great French summer festivals, Montpellier for dance, Avignon for the theater and Aix-en-Provence for the opera, there is no meter away – so all attached as in the good old days: a mask is required, but nothing temperature control. The only constraint is, for rooms with more than 1000 seats, to exhibit an antigenic pad made less than 48 hours before in affiliated pharmacies that do it for free – or, of course, the European green pass.
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The Montpellier festival returns, after a missed year due to covid, in its 41st edition. We can get an idea of the importance of the event by watching the documentary available online until August 18 on Arte
Works premiered
The festival, led by Jean-Paul Montanari, has always developed its programming by presenting as many premieres as possible, inviting foreign companies. The restrictions of this pandemic period have instead made the productions of the French National Choreographic Centers more evident, of which six are at the festival: Christian Rizzo (Montpellier), Angelin Preljocaj (Aix-en-Provence), Kader Attou (La Rochelle), Maud Le Pladec (Orléans), Thomas Lebrun (Tours), Rachid Ouramdane (Grenoble, but recently appointed head of the Palais de Chaillot-Théâtre national de la danse, in Paris).
Thus equipped with our swab, we enter the Théâtre de l’Agora in Montpellier to witness the new creation of the great French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, entitled Deleuze / Hendrix. We listen to the voice of Gilles Deleuze, the famous philosopher, as he lectures on Spinoza’s Ethics. And let’s listen to Jimi Hendrix’s roaring guitar. The choreographer has associated them: the philosopher embodies for him the free thinker par excellence; the musician is “the innovator who has turned the art of guitar and rock music into another dimension”. On these voices Preljocaj indulges in a powerful hymn to hedonism and freedom. On the words of Deleuze, the movement of the eight dancers (four men and four women) takes on a collective figure, slowness, harmony, sweetness, reflection. But when Hendrix’s voice and guitar arise, the bodies are unleashed, the sensuality explodes, the duets become torrid.