Who was Louis Fuzelier (1674-1752), the librettist of Les Indes galantes? Doubtless one of the most versatile actors of the parisian theatrical life of the first half of the 18^th century and one of its most prolific and singular authors. A craftsman who was cosmopolitan in outlook, he left behind a legacy of over 230 plays, all written for the Parisian theatres of the period, from the Théâtre de la Foire (Parisian fairground theatre) to the Comédie Française and the Académie royale de musique.

Louis Fuzelier made a successful debut at the Fair in 1701 with a play for marionettes entitled Thésée ou la Défaite des Amazones. Considering himself, quite rightly, as “the godfather of the Opéra-Comique”, he was the only writer of his generation to have worked for all the Parisian theatres: the Fairground Theatres, the Marionettes, the Comédie Italienne, the Comédie Française and the Opéra. Whilst he was the author of over 200 plays written alone or in collaboration – many of which remain in manuscript form – this polygraph was also a journalist and co-director of the Mercure de France, a theoretician, stage manager, theatre entrepreneur, director of the Opéra-Comique, poet, fabulist, polemicist, a composer of songs and cantatas, a spearhead exponent of parody – in short, a protean figure.

After the failure of his musical tragedy Arion, composed by Matho (1714), he turned to the genre currently in vogue, ballet, of which he became the principal reformer. Ballet after ballet, he attempted tirelessly to renew its aesthetic. In the preface to the Ballet des Âges composed by Campra (1718), he defended the importance of comedy on the stage of the Academie Royale de musique. With Les Fêtes grecques et romaines by Colin de Blamont (1723), he presented a “ballet of a completely new type”, with no divinities, no miraculous enchantments. In the preface to the libretto, he defended the right of opera to draw on History and gave legitimate standing to the historical ballet, in the tradition of “Scarlatti and the Buononcini who made those heroes sing whom Corneille and Racine would have had speak”. In the preface to Les Indes galantes (1735), he once again rejected “the intervention of magic” and gave “physical reasons” for the volcanic eruption in the Entrée of the Incas of Peru, quoting the example of “Popocatepetl, which is the equal of Vesuvius in Naples”:

“The volcano that serves as the focus of this American Entrée is not as fabulous an invention as the operations of magic [...]. Plenty of esteemed travellers have attested to having encountered these subterranean furnaces, composed of bitumen and sulphur, which ignite easily and produce terrible fires when a single piece of rock is rolled into their formidable abysses. The most skilful naturalists support the travellers’ testimony with physical reasoning and by experiments even more convincing that their arguments. Shall I be condemned when I introduce to the theatre a phenomenon more realistic than a magic spell? And just as apt to give rise to dramatic symphonies?”

The parodists were prompt to echo this in demystifying the theatrical “device”:

Air: When they say that I love
Lord tell me then how this burning passion came about?

Shall I explain it to you?
Here is the physical reason.
Air: Turlurette
To set alight
A loft full of faggots
You need only a match
Turlurette turlurette
My tantourlourette.

But the most original feature of his output is doubtless his taste for self-derision. This manifests itself in his self-parodies: his Fêtes grecques et romaine thus become Les Saturnales, then, in their one-act version, Le Débris des Saturnales. In La Rencontre des operas (1723), a “sort of parody” of Fêtes, Clio confides to Chriseis, the slave of Erato, the subject of his next ballet: “It’s the invasion of Spain by the Goths”, to which Chriseis replies that “Nothing could be more gracious than a chorus of Goths accompanied by barrel organs”. Each Entrée of the ballet is then dissected by a Suisse spectator, expert on “trinkink sonks”.

In his short comedy Les Malades du Parnasse, the character of the Critic is the founder of the hospital to which the invalids come to be cured and at which the surgeon “Sabrepièce”, or “Slashplay”, officiates. The ward for new operas is full to bursting. Stalls is the “learned doctor” who prepares the remedies. Fuzelier provides a critique of a dozen works including Le Nouveau monde by Pellegrin, (the future librettist of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie), a play first performed at the Comédie-Française, bedridden ever since it was printed, and Persée by Lully and Quinault, revived in November 1722, which “should have expired in the theatre after fifteen days” and which however bore up for “almost three months”. He also makes an apology for his parody, Arlequin Persée, performed in December 1722 by the Italians and which, in the hospital for invalid works, shines by its absence although it was in “great need of purging”.

All these short plays promote their author, either by self-denigration or by advocacy. Should one see in this a form of pride on the part of one who, in the manner of a Cyrano, prefers to flagellate himself rather than let other people do it? Should one interpret it as a simple conjugation of his works in different registers according to their place of performance? Or a taste for self-mockery aggrandized to an art de vivre? One thing is sure: when we read these plays, we venture into the mysteries of an authorial psychology and strategy that is complex to say the least.

Fuzelier himself gives us one of the keys to his strategy in a text published in the Recueil Clairambault-Maurepas. In a fable written in 1729, he represents himself as an author with the features of “a green and yellow toad” (the colours of madness), a runaway from the Fair, in fact sent to the Opera to mine it from within. This strategy of the mole infiltrating the repertoire of the enemy is staged in an original manner. For once, the Comédie-Française and the Foire, perennial enemies, seem to be allied against a common foe: the Opéra. Fuzelier’s skill consists in revealing the superiority of the Fair over the Comédie-Française in its strategies for ruining the enemy: 

The Foire with the Comédie
Had been plotting recently
How to ruin the Opéra.
[...]
The Foire had more poets
Than there were owls in Athens,
It was F*** that she summoned.
So the toad said “Here I am”:
Thus the Ballet des Déesses
Was born, give us two more plays
In that style and adieu Opéra.

The Amours des Déesses by Fuzelier and Quinault was also self-parodied by Fuzelier at the Saint-Laurent Fair under the title L’Enfer galant (The Galant Inferno) in August 1729. In the fable, Fuzelier’s name is written with a capital F followed by three asterisks (F***). “The great Fuzelier” written next to it is crossed out: the author-saboteur advances wearing a mask but points the mask out. Because he worked for all the theatres, Fuzelier can be considered as an emblematic figure of the absence of clear-cut distinctions between types of theatre and as a figure head of parody. A chameleon-like writer, he adapts his discourse according to the range of expectations of each theatre. These texts trace a gallery of self-portraits of Fuzelier that enrich the protean figure of this little-known author. Depicting himself as a toad, as Apollo, as the “Count of Lanlère and marquis of Lanturelu” by turns, Fuzelier gives himself up to any number of metamorphoses – in the image of his own texts – and stages himself with a sense of self-derision that was unique at the time. But through this kaleidoscope of changing portraits, the image of Fuzelier never ceases to elude us. His penchant for apologues and fables goes hand in hand with the taste he cultivates for coded messages. Perhaps he is also that gluttonous poet, an author as bulimic as he is prolific, from whom Slashplay, the surgeon at the Parnassus hospital takes blood only to find, instead of blood, “whipped cream”; or even the so-called “Flonflon, inspector general of itinerant Music in Paris, and purveyor of modern operas” from the short fairground comedy entitled La Rencontre des operas.

It is certainly no coincidence that it is from his pen that we have the most striking reciprocal exchanges between so-called “classical” and “popular” music: “A doctor must pass from tongue to tongue as men pass from white to black, and certain brunettes from black to white; as lawyers pass from for to against; as doctors send their patents from this world into the next; as music passes from the Pont-Neuf to the Opéra and from the Opéra to the Pont-Neuf...” Ironically, as history would have it, Fuzelier, despite his legendary corpulence – it was said he had himself carried around in a wheel barrow by a valet whom he called his “baptised horse” – was the principal architect of the circulation of arias and of the porosity between the various Parisian theatres.

How does one stage a major work from the French Opera repertoire which has a libretto infused with a rather outdated exoticism? For his adaptation of Les Indes galantes, Clément Cogitore brings together urban dance and baroque music on the stage of the Opéra Bastille and in so doing reveals secret connections between seemingly incompatible art forms.

On a Saturday afternoon, the Opéra Bastille looks more like a ghost ship. In the labyrinth of endless corridors which have been plunged into a state of semi-darkness, not a living soul is to be found. The technical workshops radiate an orderly calm and the main auditorium patiently awaits its resurrection in silence. And yet, on the other side of the stage’s closed curtain, “young people are dancing on top of a volcano”. After the summer break, rehearsals for Les Indes galantes have just got underway. Orchestrated under the meticulous gaze of Clément Cogitore, they offer a total contast to the peace and quiet of the rest of the building: an inverted world in which the baroque conductor and opera singers share the stage with krump, vogue and flex dancers, all of them interacting in what appears to be joyful yet studiously organised chaos. With this opera-ballet, composed by Rameau in the 18th century, the visual artist and filmmaker is directing his first opera. When we enter the auditorium, the final monologue from his first feature film, Neither Heaven nor Earth comes back to haunt us: “I await you behind a door. In a world within the world. A world beside the world. A world all around the world.”

Clément Cogitore began to imagine that other world for the video he produced for the Paris Opera’s digital platform the 3e scène. “I already loved some pieces from Les Indes galantes. I told myself that the music could play host to different bodies, different energies, different choreographic languages and tensions than those usually portrayed on stage.” When he first conceived the project, he described the kind of movements he was imagining to his friends. They pointed him towards a dance he knew little about: krump. “I didn’t know anything about that style, but I immediately understood what it was communicating. I felt it. It had the same effect on me that I had when I first saw Pina Bausch’s Café Müller. Back then, I was 15 years old and it had quite an impact: I understood everything, even though I had no analytical tool to process contemporary dance”.

Born out of the riots that shook Los Angeles in 1992, following the police beating of an African American man, krump had all the elements of a cry of suppressed rage. It ended up migrating to France, where it would be popularised in 2005 by the David LaChapelle documentary Rize. Built around three structural movements—the percussion of a foot tapping the ground, a swelling of the chest and arm swings—its language is the basis of virtuoso improvisations in which each dancer conveys their own style, and each body its memory, its history, its injuries. As a preamble to his piece Éloge du puissant royaume (Praise the Mighty Kingdom), the choreographer Heddy Maalem offers a lucid definition: “It seems that the world gave rise to something there that no one expected: a dance from within, authentically spiritual, made to drive out the demons and utter those unexpressed words stuck in the throats of those who couldn’t even cry out anymore. (…) It is a dance from the beginning or the end of time which expresses the essence of what makes a man today. It is a secret for him as he stands tall in the darkest moments of his own night.”

Filmed in January 2017 on the cold, bare stage of the Opéra Bastille, Clément Cogitore’s short piece arrived like a bombshell. Set to the aria “Les Sauvages” from the final act of Les Indes galantes, some thirty dancers form a circle, scornfully eye one another and challenge each other. Even the camera seems to assume bodily form to participate in the battle.

“The last thing I wanted was for the performance to become a reboot of some of those projects from the 1990s and 2000s where they invite a few street dancers for three minor tours only to disappear afterwards.”

The hypnotic video was nominated in the Best Short Film category at the 2019 Césars. But above all, it appealed to Stéphane Lissner, the director of the Paris Opera who ultimately asked the filmmaker to stage and direct the work in its entirety.

A few weeks before the premiere, Clément Cogitore is wary of reading over-elliptic reports in the press. “What risks annoying me the most is the idea of “disaffected suburbs at the Opera” which we’re bound to hear. The last thing I wanted was for the performance to become a reboot of some of those projects from the 1990s and 2000s where they invite a few street dancers for three minor tours only to disappear afterwards.” In its heyday under Louis XIV, the opera-ballet was viewed as the quintessential artistic manifestation of the grandeur of the monarchy and the splendour of court society. If you then lend baroque music certain powers that are almost magical, even curative, then dance assumes a role that is primarily illustrative or decorative. But it was out of the question for the director to relegate dance to a purely ornamental level, to use it as a mere embellishment in the narrative, or worse, to exploit it as a gimmick to make opera “cooler” or “younger”.

As a result, for the choreography, he reached out to Bintou Dembélé, with whom he had already worked on the making of his short film. “I was really enthusiastic”; she says with a slightly provocative smile. “Clément urged me to take a risk. It was a call to make a break with the past, to rethink what opera—and our dances—could be: how could the passion inside us take on another form?” The question was not a new one for her. A product of the “second generation” of urban dance, she choreographed her first solo piece in 2010 and entered the world of contemporary dance. “Having started out dancing on a box on my housing estate it was quite overwhelming to suddenly find myself in front of white folks on major stages around the country. So, I asked myself: who is my audience? Is my story, are our stories, something they could understand? I didn’t know. But I’d broken my body on the asphalt, so I had to find other ways to make my anger audible.” For Les Indes galantes, she worked on the movement as if it were a continuous dialogue with the music, playing on its dissonances, and accompanying or contrasting the constant mood changes of the melody. At times synchronised, at others highly improvised, almost freestyle, her choreography materialises in a contrasting range, but always on equal terms with the orchestra and the singers.

In a genre, which in her own words, “isn’t intended” for her, Bintou Dembelé rediscovers the preoccupations that stir her: the organic entanglement between dance, music and voice. She is not alone in detecting unexpected connections between urban dance and opera-ballet. “French baroque, it’s the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles! It’s truly an art of bedazzlement, the spectacular. In terms of details and ornamentation, it’s very precise, very affected. Except, that aspect is not written into the score, which leaves the musicians some degree of freedom to reveal all their virtuosity. And ta-da! You realise that dance culture also leaves a lot of room for improvisation”, confirms the musicologist and dramaturg Katherina Lindekens with contagious joy.

If switching to the stage has made him change his language, with Les Indes galantes Clément Cogitore still finds himself grappling with the notion of the impossible dialogue that has haunted him from the very beginning. “I can’t film people who are like me. I need to go and find other communities, professions or groups that seem far removed from me, that don’t have the same history, the same vision of the world, the same beliefs or the same culture. And slowly but surely, I establish a connection and find the common denominator.” In his first full-length feature film, a group of French troops in Afghanistan are confronted by a series of disappearances which to them seem irrational; the documentary-installation Braguino homed in on the metaphysical combat between two feuding families in the heartlands of the Siberian Taiga. The narrative of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera-ballet reveals, in four scenes, the eternal misconceptions which exist between the Europeans who have set out to conquer the world and the people they encounter. On this particular day, the team are focused on the “second entrée”, the storyline of which has all the allure of bad made-for-TV movie: In Peru, an Incan princess who is about to marry a Spanish officer finds herself betrayed by the High Priest of the Sun who also happens to be madly in love with her. The project’s dramatist Simon Hatab says “the High Priest Huascar is melodrama villain. There is more psychology in the second part. One of the challenges for Clément is to communicate as much in the space that he has imagined and in a way that has nothing naturalistic about it.”

But how do you adapt a libretto written in a context where slavery was accepted by all, in which the first mirages of orientalism were emerging and which, with the passage of time, seems at best outmoded and at worst, blatantly racist? The director pondered his approach carefully.

“Finding the right relationship with a work that predates me and which has its own history, is like finding the right relationship to a situation or someone in a documentary: they exist, it’s a fact. It’s like having a romantic relationship: I go through several stages, from seduction to union, even if I don’t agree with them. That said, the one thing I will not allow myself to do is judge them. History will do its work; the stage is not a courtroom.”

After working with Clément Cogitore on the much remarked upon short film Les Indes galantes for the 3rd Stage, the choreographer Bintou Dembélé is renewing her collaboration with that director, this time taking up Rameau’s opera-ballet in its entirety. A major exponent of Hip Hop in France, she has drawn on a huge range of sources including Krump, Voguing, Waacking, Popping and Electro, all languages that she delights in subverting. Here she explains how each of these dances has its own political history. Histories of emancipation through dance.

Can you retrace the journey that has led to your choreographing Rameau’s music today?

Bintou Dembélé: For me, dancing Rameau’s music is part of a progression that began in 2010: when I created my first solo, I needed to explore through dance other music besides Hip Hop. I became interested in repetitive, minimalist, cyclic music; in rhythmic polyphonies; in composers like Philip Glass, Robert Fripp, Doudou N’diaye Rose. I then collaborated with the musician Charles Amblard and the vocalist Charlène Andjembé for a new work – S/T/R/A/T/E/S-Quartet, which allied dance, music and voice live. We worked using a sound set-up piloted by the computer programme Live and a quadriphonic system. We wanted to create a circular space, both sonic and choreographic, and rethink the audience space. I was animated by the same thinking for Les Indes galantes: how could the ritualistic dimension of our dances be suffused into spaces seemingly remote from it? How to contaminate, reassemble and create a community which would englobe dancers, soloists, chorus, musicians and the audience all at the same time?

When you tackled Rameau’s opera ballet, you worked first of all from an instrumental version before returning to a version with voices. Can you describe the process of appropriating this work?

B.D.: When I tackled Les Indes galantes, I got myself a recording on iTunes of the work in an instrumental version: music without words. Initially, I wanted to distance myself from the colonial, slave-owning mind-set of the libretto. I also wanted to isolate the music from the voice, so that I could subsequently take up the latter in its physical dimension, like another instrument, a “flow”. When I worked on Clément’s short film for the 3^rd Stage, there was this moment when the voice of the soloist seemed to emerge from the hand of a dancer, as if from a loud-hailer. It was traversed by the flow of energy that resounded with its internal tensions, before it was passed on to another dancer. The “flow” is that energy transmitted by the voice and vocal movements, like vibes in Rap or R’n’B. This power of the voice is also at the heart of the project.

For this project you have worked using a vast array of dances such as Krump, Voguing, Popping and Electro. What guided these choices?

B.D.: In the course of my discussions with Clément, I began to imagine movements on the music: movements from Krump, Voguing, Popping, Glyding, Waacking, Bboying and Electro. These dance forms – originally from the Underground, from competitions or from clubbing as well as from the performing arts – were all born out of different political, historical, cultural and social contexts. They all testify to historic, counter-cultural movements that re-emerge periodically, each decade. They aim for emancipation, empowerment, for the re-appropriation of public space. They are practised by dancers of various generations, who have constructed themselves differently against the background of globalisation and technological progress – according to whether they grew up in the era of television, of DVD, of Internet, Social Media, YouTube or Instagram.

You have refused to use the term “ballet corps” to qualify the ensemble formed by these twenty-nine dancers...

B.D.: Yes, we prefer to talk about Fame, House or Crew. When you want to invent new worlds, you have first of all to invent a new vocabulary. However, I never said to myself that our production would be a puzzle or a patchwork. What interested me was that the dancers should re-invest their own personal history, their own narrative through these dances and above all not remain entrenched in their style. This approach might at first have shaken them up, because dancers of Bboying are not in principle adapted for dancing Electro: their bodies are not fashioned in the same way, they do not have the same way of apprehending music and movement. We started out from these dances the better to subvert them.

You define yourself as a choreographer but, on several occasions, you have underlined the fact that this would describes your creative process and your relationship with dance rather badly. Why?

B.D.: I question the word “choreography” because it contains the idea of writing down the gesture. Now, in writing it down, in some way, one normalises it. Art is not separate from society: artistic forms are generated by History. As dancers, the same goes for our bodies, which are moulded in a multitude of ways by genre, class, nationality, “race” in Angela Davis’s definition of the term... As a creator, I seek to escape from these norms, to create a space in which the dancer can redefine her/his freedom. Because our bodies also recount an historical reality, the movement we transmit is not neutral. For example, it so happens that, in the course of my career, I injured my shoulder. If I show a movement to a dancer and ask her/him to reproduce it, I risk passing on my injury, my neurosis at the same time as the movement. So, since choreography is there to contort bodies, I want the dancer to contort the choreography for her/himself in order to conquer her/his own space for expression.

A lot of your work has been based on the notion of “marronnage” or slave resistance, also explored by writers like Dénétem Touam Bona and critics such as Sylvie Chalaye. Can you explain this notion and tell us why it inspires you?

B.D.: Historically, “marronnage” refers to the flight of enslaved Africans or Amerindians from the plantations in order to found new, free societies. Later, this notion was extended to the arts, notably by the authors you have cited: it is a matter of subverting a system of constraints in order to conquer a space of freedom. For me, subversion and subterfuge are the key words in Street Dance. How do you find freedom amid constraint? How do you find a way out from within contortion? One day, a very well-known dancer, Poe One, twisted his ankle in the middle of a performance. Instead of stopping, he decided to continue dancing. In an emergency, he succeeded in developing new gestures which, once his ankle had healed, enriched his choreographic vocabulary.

In our project, this marronnage is both visible and invisible. It is played out both on stage and behind the scenes. I wanted to slow down time; I wanted us to create a space for training, for raising awareness. I wanted us to be able to give certain dancers the opportunity to further our thinking alongside us. Our reflexions took us through an arc of 360° before we tackled the real business of the choreographic work, involving, for example, the participation of the historian Maboula Soumahoro, intellectuals Maxime Cervulle and Isabelle Launay as well as the choreographer Brigitte Massin, a specialist in Baroque dance.

How does this marronnage enrich your dialogue with the music of Rameau?

B.D.: I often say to dancers that we are not the servants of music and voice. We have to accommodate and dialogue with them as partners in creation. The forms and codes of Rameau’s music lend themselves to this dialogue, this search for freedom, this marronnage. Let’s take the example of the da capo form, which is omnipresent in Baroque music. It is a typical musical structure of the A-B-A type which exposes an initial idea, contrasts it with a second one before returning to the first, now modified by this progression. During one of the first rehearsals, I was working on a solo with one of the dancers. On the A motif, he was moving backwards and forwards in a form of spatial constraint: his trajectory was linear, guided by the music, following the lines of the voice and the flute like a shadow. The B motif allowed him to escape in a circular movement that was more engaged and extraverted. Finally, with the return of the A motif, the connection between the dancer, the music and the voice had changed. He had found his place. He was no longer constrained, he orchestrated it, he allowed himself to tell his story. Suddenly, it was as if it were he who was directing the voice and the flute, as if he had deviated from the path and found a way of crossing the boundaries that had limited his movement before. As if, through this corporeal memory, space had also become a place of freedom to be conquered.