After their association in The heart vesselat the opening of the Bourgie Hall season in 2019, the company Ballet-Opéra-Pantomime (BOP) and the director Cédric Delorme-Bouchard present, at Usine C, The nave, a show for four pianists and eight dancers. Hyphen with The heart vessel : the music of Olivier Messiaen.
This is the third time that BOP has designed Messiaen, after the Quartet for the end of time at the closing of the OFFTA in 2017, a dance performance staged with Dave St-Pierre, and The heart vessela ritual around Three small liturgies of the divine presence. “We think this music may seem dry at first, but it’s very accessible. Or, even if it’s not so accessible, in a show atmosphere with something visual, it’s music to consider,” says Hubert Tanguay-Labrosse, co-director of BOP with Alexis Raynault.
The designer of heart vessel had already been Cédric Delorme-Bouchard. “Cédric being an artist in residence at Usine C, whereas for the first collaboration we had invited him into our world at the Bourgie room, there, it’s the opposite, in a room with a lot of technical resources for lighting. , the video. It was he who came up with the idea of a large scenography with four grand pianos, like a kind of central altar,” emphasizes Alexis Raynault.
Pulsation and temporality
Hubert Tanguay-Labrosse and Alexis Raynault looked for music for this device. The wedding by Stravinsky did not correspond to the project. “Hubert had the idea of starting from Visions of the Amen de Messiaen to see if it would be possible to arrange them for four pianos, and we finally settled on a selection made from the Visions of the Amen and Twenty looks at the Child Jesus, which we were going to arrange so that the sound circulates in space with four pianos accompanying the dance. »
The musical dramaturgy will arise from the order of the pieces, from their eventual recurrence. “Messiaen eliminates any feeling of pulsation, of temporality. It’s very easy to dance and stage; the movement can be extremely free and the dancers can even go against the piece. If the room is quieter, they can go fast and it will work just fine. We can really create something for the movement on this music,” says Hubert Tanguay-Labrosse. Taken aback at first, the dancers quickly acclimatized to Messiaen. “Besides, there are also two creations in the show, and the more it progressed, the more the dancers wanted to dance to Messiaen. It wasn’t such a big shock,” said the co-director of BOP in an amused tone.
For its new projects, BOP, which has been able to function during the pandemic thanks to collaborations with the Opéra de Montréal and the Violons du Roy, will continue its work. “We aim to present a creation each year and to prepare one or two at the same time,” says Alexis Raynault. Dance will be at the center of the next project, before a return to opera the following year, a rather titillating project to update baroque opera whose creation is scheduled for 2024.