L'envol

"Angelin Preljocaj, Topologie de l'invisible" offers 3 films corresponding to 3 choreographies. 1.- Annonciation (2003), directed by Angelin Preljocaj. Annonciation dances the encounter between the Angel Gabriel and Mary, when the angel announces that she is God’s chosen one – an essential scene of conception, of the birth of faith and culture. 2.- Les Raboteurs (1988), directed by Cyril Collard. A contemporary couple in an empty room in a Parisian. They talk of love, vision, points of view and illusion. Is what these three dancers on the wooden have frozen in space with their choreographed movements and the positions of the three workers in Gustave Caillebotte’s painting The Floor Scrapers? 3.- Un trait d'union (1992), directed by Angelin Preljocaj. Adaptation of La Chambre by Jean-Paul Sartre. A story of a woman who has married and her second husband has turned insane. Her whole surrounding urges her to let the man be transported into an asylum, yet she refuses.

Disaster strikes during an impromptu safety inspection of a building site. The workers must work together to fix the mess – but not everyone is present…

Polina is a young dancer from a modest family. After years of ballet academy, she is accepted by the Bolshoi; still, she decides to try and audition of a modern dance company in France. She makes it, but her journey will not end there...

To speak of that ballet is very difficult because the theme is so popular as a fairy tale, adapted by Perrault from German folklore and then recuperated from the same folklore by the Grimm brothers, and what's more turned into an unforgettable film by Walt Disney. Angelin Preljocaj was thus trying to break a mould in which that character and her story had been cast seemingly for ever. And it is a success. Because first the setting, the stage direction are very interesting and rich. Rich are the costumes. Rich are the main ideas of the setting like the enormous magic mirror coming down from the sky, or like the deep underground mine turned into a vertical surface on which the seven dwarfs are dancing like dragon-flies on their strings.

A filmed performance of Stravinsky's ballet Les Noces (The Wedding), depicting a bleakly cynical interpretation of the marriage ritual.