Four Seasons and Cantata
MARCH 2011 Cantata : Quartet on stage Théâtre Maisonneuve - 8 P.M.Pre-show talks: one hour before each performance
Photo : Robert Etcheverry
Pre-show talks: one hour before each performance
Achetez vos billets
Matinées
Evening
2009 - 2010 SEASON
TYPEContemporary
CHOREOGRAPHYMauro Bigonzetti
MUSICFour Seasons: Vivaldi and Cantata: Original music and traditional music of Southern Italy
Four Seasons and Cantata
An Italian evening
Seasons of the heart
"It would never have crossed my mind before to choreograph to the music of Vivaldi's Four Seasons," says Bigonzetti. "If it had, I would have thought I'd lost my mind. The music is some of the world's best known and most often interpreted!" Still, the choreographer risked the venture, and carried off the challenge of expressing something different through pieces that have been interpreted thousands of times, evoking people's internal seasons, their states of mind and their changes of heart.
Created for Les Grands Ballets in May 2007, Bigonzetti's first ballet for a Canadian company is one of Les Grands greatest successes on tour, performed, among others, at Les Étés de la danse festival in Paris in 2008 and at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts last summer.
Colours of the South
Cantata, originally created for Ballet Gulbenkian in 2001, was added to Les Grands' repertoire in 2007. With its visceral, passionate gestural language, Cantata evokes rugged Mediterranean beauty and spreads the colours of the South. Instinctive and vital, the dance explores the multiple facets of relations between men and women, from seduction to passion and from quarrels to jealousy. Cantata pays homage to Italian culture and to its musical tradition, popular in the most noble sense of the word. The piece is inspired by Italian music from the 18th and 19th centuries, from lullabies to the pizziche of Salento, and with a nod to Neapolitan serenades. The voices and music of the singers of Gruppo Musicale Assurd draw the 10 pairs of dancers into the festive atmosphere of southern Italy, to the sounds of the tambourine and castanets.
Four Seasons employs "a gestural language that's bubbling, joyous and filled with humour, bringing to mind the curious, indomitable creatures - animal and human - that are found in Nature." according to Le Devoir (Montréal)
"Earthy and human," says The Boston Globe of the ballet, and according to the Daily News Egypt (Cairo), it is "radiating with spirit and passion". La Presse (Montréal) calls it "a Vesuvian rumbling" intimately linking dance with music.
