LYON OPERA BALLET / MARLENE MONTEIRO FREITAS

The heritage of the carnival celebrations of Marlene Monteiro Freitas’ childhood in Cape Verde runs throughout her choreographies, which feature a disruption of genders and the confusion of identities. Her work draws on childhood emotions and a sense of play to develop a power that is truly organic. “A choreography is a living, unpredictable form”, she loves to say, as is also the case in a tennis match or other sports competition. For it is the world of sport, another form of surpassing oneself through physical virtuosity, that interests her, specifically its grammar of gestures and expressions, its codified rituals and contrasting emotions, the images of which television and the Internet have helped emblazon on our minds. The seventeen team members/dancers, whose cartoonish faces seem choreographic elements in their own right, take us along with them into another reality, where the boundaries between human, animal, and machine have become blurred.