The Monte Carlo Ballets presents a two-part program marked by an unprecedented juxtaposition of human tragedy, dance, and theater.
White Darkness
Nacho Duato composed the one-act ballet, White Darkness, as a requiem for the untimely loss of a sister. The result is a masterpiece which, according to critics, has “reached impossible heights” in the landscape of modern art.
The ballet’s heroine, having lost faith in love, seeks oblivion; but the path she has chosen brings her not joy but feverish agitation, followed by disappointment, alienation and self-imposed isolation.
Nacho Duato does not consider dance to be a form of social commentary, but he nevertheless uses it to convey the most complex of themes. “I am deeply struck by how sad it is when young people al- low drugs to ruin their lives and slip into a dark world, a world so dark, in fact, that there is no escape from it,” the choreographer explains, on the subject of the emotional background to this production.
The Lavender Follies
My choreographic work is a love letter to performance. Performance has the ability to shape perspective in unique and ephemeral way.
Joseph Hernandez
Because dance cannot exist outside of the exact moment that it is performed, there is an urgency that I have always loved. My role is to create situations within which dancers and performers are able to feel this urgency. It is this urgency to live and hunger to communicate that can turn an ordinary event into something that soars.
The Lavender Follies is a piece that uses theatrical history as a playground. My first memories of dance and performance came from VHS tapes of musicals that I would watch with my parents when I was very young. The systems and traditions that were started by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Sondheim, Kander and Ebb, and Bob Fosse have had a great influence on how theatre and dance is presented. With this piece I pull on these traditions as guidance and marry the aesthetics of the past to the complexity of contemporary dance.
