In seven different tempos, Franck Krawczyk and the dancers of the Ballet National de Marseille revisit Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Suffering, sensuality and sacrifice are awakened by the power of the piano and the melancholy of the accordion. Echoing this, or rather in dialogue with it, the dancers’ bodies respond with whipped-up gestures and sheer determination. In this piece, Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten carry on exploring the relationship between music and dance, while continuing their research into the simplicity and visionary force of the body.

Emio Greco was born in 1965 in Brindisi, a port in southern Italy, into a modest peasant-farming family. A classically-trained dancer, he spent three years at the Rosella Hightower Centre in Cannes before joining the Ballet Antibes Côte d'Azur. But it was while dancing with Jan Fabre, from 1993 to1996, that he revealed his fabulous talent as a performer. Marrying his instinctive and spontaneous approach to the figurative and visual world of Jan Fabre, Emio Greco savoured this taste for “the skin of the animal”, this fragile and violent creature cowering within us which rebels against the rules that safeguard harmonies and disciplines. In 1996 he joined the Karas company, run by Japanese choreographer and sculptor Saburo Teshigawara, for whom the body is a sculpture brought to life and which its maker animates in space and light, a genesis impregnated with spirituality and oriental aesthetics. There is no doubt that Saburo Teshigawara conveyed to him the idea of the specific potential which, according to him, lies in the transience of this art: dance is born of the acute awareness of what is and what will be. Having absorbed the wealth this fine and incisive choreographic culture, Emio Greco undertook his own choreographic and research project in parallel after meeting the director Pieter C. Scholten in 1995, relentlessly searching for new ways to allow the body's wisdom to express itself.

With Pieter C. Scholten, he founded the company EG | PC in Amsterdam, which works on a triple principle of contemporary creation, interdisciplinary exchanges – within the framework of International Choreographic Art Center Amsterdam (ICKamsterdam) which they also founded and which houses their company – and teaching, provided by the Accademia Mobile. Experimental in its principle (Bianco, Rosso, Extra Dry, a trilogy, 1996-2000), the dance of Greco and Scholten has been developing since 1998 around the concept of Double Points, short pieces which are similar to the events of Merce Cunningham. Their dance also appropriates traditional heritage, through a tetralogy which explores Dante's Divine Comedy – the first three parts being Hell (2006), then Popopera and In visione ([Purgatory], 2006-2008) – and through the rediscovery (and reinterpretation) of Bach, whose St Matthew Passion inspires the music accompanying the solo by Emio Greco in In visione.
 

Source : Maison de la Danse 

More information : www.ballet-de-marseille.com

Back in 1972, Roland Petit created the Ballets de Marseille. Having lost  its -s, the Ballet has become a Centre Chorégraphique National in 1984  and is now run by Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten. The creation and  dissemination of shows by the Ballet and guest artists are at the heart  of what it does. Very much rooted in our time, curious about and open to  the world, the BNM is also a prestigious part of Marseille’s cultural  heritage, close to Parc Borély.

Source: BNM

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