Alain Platel says it is important to show suffering in order to intensify the commiseration and compassion. Compassion is a tainted word often associated with condescension. Usually taken in its negative form, as a passive feeling which does not lead directly to a change, compassion entails a more operative role in change if we realise that we all 'have one thing in common, namely that we are mortal, with everything that implies in terms of sickness and loss'. If we realise that nobody is better off than us in this, then this can affect the way we think and act.
Com-passion, with passion, will become the same as loving thy neighbour.
Love others as you love yourself is more the essence of a morality than a religion, it entails a form of leaving among others. In Christ's Passion, on which Bach's Mathew Passion is based, we learn 'an essential fact of human existence, that we are here to die'. The emphasis is on suffering, physical suffering and suffering through the other. It is about the individual's ultimate sacrifice: himself.
Pitié!, the new production of les ballets C de B, by director Alain Platel and composer Fabrizio Cassel (who created VSPRS, 2006) is based on Bach's Mathew Passion. Not simply adapting Bach's sublime music, Cassol creates a new story, beyond Mathew the Evangelist's tale and the poetic version of Bach's librettist, a story foccused on the mother's pain (a non-existent part in the original Mathew Passion), while the central figure, Christ, is divided in two twin souls with a common destiny (Jesus and Mary Magdalene). The desmultiplication into three central figures not only have biblical resonances but it actually entails a counter-biblical understanding of its characters, namely the role of Mary Magdalene and Jesus as twin souls, one not excluding the other, as one male/female soul in the cross, Christ.
The dancers themselves become this trinity, becoming in their own time, their own personal jesus, their own personal Christ. And then the question becomes real and tangible through compassion: 'What do you feel inside?
The 'bastard' dance that Platel has developed seeks exactly this, the physical translation of over-intense emotions in the transcendence of the individual. The contemporary 'shiver and shake dance' is here combined with grand écarts, in a hybridised form of dance that seems an 'inexhaustible source of inspiration: passing on movement material until it becomes distorted and changed so that it no longer expresses the particular identity of one thing or the other.' Movements get distorted, transformed and irrecognizable through the reinterpretation of different bodies doing identical movements, never being the same again. They become private, not following the structure of public movements, but actually materializing the deep structure of the soul inside the body, screaming for the other. A form of turning the world inside out, of finding the other within ourselves.
Regarding the religious feeling as a very private matter (an extreme intimacy know as communion), the performance traces this moments of absolute intimacy, when we show more openly the need of the other, of the flesh of the other body, our own flesh.
Intimacy is intensified in the unfolding of the Passion, not following a narrative structured development, but being constrained by the experience of an emotional crescendo through the body. Skin and flesh become more and more present in the unfolding of the emotions, revealing the incredible need to feel 'the other'. It is about the passion, in all its sexuality, reproduction and viscerality, as the mother when speaking of their children, says 'flesh of my flesh'.
When the mother holds the son devoid of life in her arms, we are not looking at the 'mother murderess' (that without condemnation, reflects the deepest conviction of Alain Platel), we are testimoning the real mother that did not step in and take her child's place, suffering through the other that already suffered. This redoubling of suffering is the actual Pitié! The actual image that we take from this experience, is that change does not come from the understanding of the mening of compassion, real change comes from the actuality of the feeling of compassion: I love thy neighbour!
[ images video: Pitié!, les ballets C de la B, directed by Alain Platel, music by Fabrizio Cassol based on Mathew Passion by J.S. Bach, peformed by Aka Moon ]
Labels: alain platel, bach, dance, fabrizio cassol, les ballets C de la B
Amei este espectaculo. fascinante de verdade e muito intenso.