Courtesy Théâtre de la Ville © photo Christian Ganet

A glowing last supper that explodes in a burst of colour, announces the end of humanity. A reversal of all the Christian symbolism that has penetrated western society as the performers emerge from a fragmented darkness, punctuated by flashes of light, by shadowy moments where dark figures scurry by like rats, where humans are lit as though struck by lightning or bathed in ominous rumblings of machines, and sound bites extracted from a dying culture. Salves by Maguy Marin is a powerful gaze projected on our contemporary world that captures the way we are defiling and ultimately destroying ourselves. This visual sound poem is dominated by Antoine Garry’s sound design, by Alexandre Béneteaud’s lighting design, by the collected efforts of Louis Gros and Pierre Treille with their magnificent props, and ultimately by Maguy Marin’s deeply layered choreography and visual design – a great global retelling of human history.

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Photo: Bruce Barrett

Watching these two performances by the Alonzo King Lines Ballet I felt myself being transported into an archaic world configured by the power of heat, and light, and air and earth, yet drawing our gaze into a world of highly ritualized human movement that has clear links to the present. The two performances, Resin and Scheherazade were very different. Resin had no narrative. It was abstract and yet the music, taken from Sephardi music, Israeli teaching  of an alphabet lesson, songs in Yiddish , in Ladino, in Arabic, create a soundscape of Mediterranean non-western tones, produced by sad wailing voices and instruments of multiple origins that prepare us for the exploding of our classical notions of balletic movement. Highly formalistic, this company is bathed in a rethinking of the human body subjected to a rigorous ballet training completely transformed by a new sense of bodily stance and new

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