Les Fleurs

Let’s make a bouquet out of all our flowers, something like a collection. Poems are like communicating vessels, just like those characters who, trapped in their monstrous solitudes, look at each other from inside the magnificent cathedral that is existence.

Les Fleurs, a performance inspired by the famous title of Charles Baudelaire’s work, focuses on poetic language and its revolutionary impact on the contemporary body, a political body, within a vision of freedom and dialogue with civilized society.

The musical environment inhabited by the performers is composed by Guido Affini; as with a concept album, the score becomes the dramaturgical scaffolding, concealing and scattering fragments of Léo Ferré, electronic sound, and distant subliminal refrains which in turn  transform into the soundtracks of the six characters on stage.

After numerous projects that engaged with prose and where action dictated the pace, this time the company is approaching poetry – a universe whose words evoke endless images, thus allowing dance to erupt like a geyser.

“Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal,” says Michela Lucenti, “is one great ‘perforated’ narrative. It is a story of situations, made up of images, with fractures, holes, and areas where each of us can find ourselves, discovering common traits and shared vulnerabilities. This collection of poems talks about the beauty in the imperfect bodies of those on the fringes of society, the outcasts, the borderline figures who, when seen from a new perspective, become magnificent creatures. This resonates strongly with Balletto Civile’s philosophy, which has always created its works by giving the body over to a lyrical narrative of anti-hero protagonists.”

The performance, whose strong narrative rhythm is determined by the poet’s texts and original writings, centers around a confrontation between dance and the poetic act, seen as a possible rewriting of the world.

The six figures on stage represent the piece’s core themes: the poet, beauty, time, boredom, exile, rebellion, the wound, the city, and finally, poetry itself.

The stage, bare and physical, welcomes the characters as if it were a luminous and sonic installation; there the bodies, with their geometries of marginalized existence, produce strong, impactful images that, like cuts on a canvas, try to leave a graphic mark on the spectator’s retina. This is achieved through a language that is at first solitary, and then evolves into shared architectures, blurring personal feelings with the shared wounds of the community.

The artist is able to see all the wonders of the world, yet they cannot help but also feel all its terrors on their own skin. We cannot hide from this risk. Baudelaire was the first contemporary poet to experience not only the heights but also the sacrifices and pettiness to which artists are subjected, and to turn these reflections into art.

Les Fleurs gives life to a dramaturgy of visions and a script of images, to which Jacopo Benassi’s photographic work can connect. Invited into the rehearsal room by the choreographer,  Benassi captures the details of the bodies as they are: imperfect and raw, yet simultaneously attractive and fascinating.

On performance days, his images will be exposed inside the hosting theatre. Déménagement – a duet depicting the long love story between Charles Baudelaire and his French-African lover Jeanne Duval – will serve as a prologue to the show. In it, the two performers will support each other, metaphorically retracing the debris of a love story.