Les Indes Galantes
Clément Cogitore
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Dates & hours
The video installation “Les Indes galantes” is accessible on the days and hours of performances at the Onassis Stegi.
From 11.04 to 17.04, the installation will not be accessible to the audience due to the sound intervention of the performance Once to be Realised.
Introduction
Six minutes of ecstasy, on loop. Street dance bursts into the sanctum that is opera and radicalizes the DNA of contemporary dance. No-one will be able to sit still when next they hear music by Rameau.
Photo: Les Films Pelléas – 3ème Scène Opéra national de Paris
This 2017 short film went viral the moment it was released online, and acted as a filmic prelude to the production of the same title directed by Clément Cogitore for the Opéra Bastille in Paris in 2019.
These six minutes are an act of public recourse. A lifting of the boundaries between urbane spectacle and urban realities. The colonial overtones of this 18th-century opera, which presented non-Europeans as “exotic slaves”, are expunged, and the dance floor given over to whom it rightfully belongs: to those who walk the world’s streets freely, demanding emancipation from violence, from power, from toxic stereotypes and baseless rules on what dance, art, democratic representation, freedom, and life itself should or should not be. Urbane culture has been subverted and is now passing the scepter over to urban culture. Because the world and its streets, its cultures, and its dance forms exist so as to rightfully belong to everyone, equally.
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Photo: Les Films Pelléas – 3ème Scène Opéra national de Paris
Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) was a great music theorist of his time and the chief musician in the court of Louis XV, following in the footsteps of Jean Baptiste Lully, who was the beloved music superintendent for Louis XIV – also known as the Sun King.
“Les Indes galantes” is an opéra-ballet with a libretto written by Louis Fuzelier. Rameau first presented the work in 1735 at the Académie Royale de Musique, where it met with great success. As a result, the composer added a fourth entrée (act) – “Les Sauvages” (“The Savages”) – to the original three in 1736.
The “Indies” of the title was not in reference to one specific location, but rather was meant to represent “exotic” places more generally: the Ottoman Empire, Peru, Persia, and North America.
The four entrées (acts) are distinct and independent from one another, though all share an overarching theme – love – introduced in a prologue where Hébé, the goddess of youth, is disappointed by the youths of Europe, who are only interested in war. And so she sends L’Amour (the personification of love) to explore how youths in far-flung places look upon love.
Rameau is thought to have been inspired by Native American ritual dances for the music of the fourth act. Some of the work’s themes reappear in later music history – the story of the first act, for example, appears in Mozart’s “The Abduction from the Seraglio”. Though the work has vocal sections, the greatest weight is placed on the dance scenes. Rameau’s music here has already attained a very high level of skill.
Sources: 20120302_program.pdf (tsso.gr) and Jean-Philippe Rameau and “The Savages” / Anthoula Daniil - Hartis (hartismag.gr)
