The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 23 (2017) No. 1

Lully on DVD: A Focus on Dance

Rose A. Pruiksma*

1. Introduction

2. Comparing approaches in Persée and Armide

3. Comic antics, heroic love: two chaconnes

Appendix

References

1. Introduction

1.1 Before 2005, when Toronto-based Opera Atelier released its production of Persée (1682), there was no full-length commercial video of a single Lully opera. As of August 2017 there are four, plus a complete performance of Molière and Lully’s comédie-ballet Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670) directed by Benjamin Lazar, with music provided by Vincent Dumestre and Le Poème Harmonique. After the success of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, released in 2005, Lazar and Dumestre continued their collaboration with a 2008 DVD of the opera Cadmus et Hermione (1673). In 2011, FRA Musica released two DVDs of Lully operas performed by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants—one a revival of Jean-Marie Villégier’s 1986 staging of Atys (1676) and the other their 2008 Paris production of Armide (1686), directed by Robert Carsen.^[1] (See the discography in the Appendix.) In addition, supplemental resources make it possible to show several compelling performances of Baroque choreographies: Ken Pierce and Jennifer Thorp’s article and supporting videos in this journal on the dances in Persée; Catherine Turocy’s performance of Louis Pécour’s virtuosic passacaille from Armide; and two performances of the “Chaconne d’Arlequin” available on YouTube.^[2]

1.2 These resources provide new possibilities for bringing Lully’s stage works to life in the classroom. They facilitate discussions concerning the relationship between historical knowledge gleaned from surviving sources and the competing goals of musicians, choreographers, and dramaturges who collaborate to bring such works from a past time and distant cultural context to life in performance for a paying public. While our textbooks and anthologies tend to focus on the vocal music from the operas, dance is an equally important component.^[3] The centrality of dance to Lully’s dramatic works presents particular challenges for performers: how to render compelling, legible choreographies for audiences who generally have no steps and gestures for any choreographed social dances, let alone Baroque dance steps, in their visual or muscle memories. Similar challenges face the classroom teacher.

1.3 Each of these productions takes a different approach to the dance: from Francine Lancelot and Béatrice Massin’s exquisite, but distant, new choreographies for the revival of Atys that use the step vocabulary codified in Beauchamp-Feuillet notation at the turn of the eighteenth century, to Jeannette Zingg’s ballet-infused nod to Baroque dance in Persée, to the dynamic Baroque-dance-influenced choreographies of Cécile Roussat for Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and Gudrun Skamletz for Cadmus et Hermione, and the modern dance steps and Bollywood-inspired gestures of Jean-Claude Gallotta’s choreography for Armide. The large variation-form dances embedded within these works and captured on video in these productions—chaconnes and passacailles—offer fruitful opportunities for exploring how directors and choreographers work with textual, musical, iconographic, and choreographic sources to create performances that are both artistically satisfying and connected to the historical context that generated the work in the first place. These dances (all currently available on YouTube as well as the DVDs) will be the focus of the remainder of this essay: the passacailles from Persée (Act 5, scene 8) and Armide (Act 5, scene 2) and the chaconnes from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (final divertissement) and Cadmus et Hermione (Act 1, scene 4).

2. Comparing approaches in Persée and Armide

2.1 The starkly different choreographic approaches to the passacailles from Persée and Armide and the fact that each has at least one extant early eighteenth-century theatrical choreography allow for productive comparisons both between the two modern productions and between the new and historical choreographies.^[4] Neither libretto prescribes detailed action, nor did Lully list names or numbers of dancers in his opera librettos; both Zingg and Gallotta work with stage directions that leave ample room for imaginative interpretation. In the opening of her passacaille for Persée (https://youtu.be/vpORinLnFug?t=1h57m43s), Zingg draws on the historical choreography for this dance by Louis Pecour. For comparison, see Pierce and Thorpe’s performance of Pécour’s duet choreography: https://sscm-jscm.org/v10/no1/pierce/video02.html. On first glance, Gallotta’s choreography for the passacaille from Armide (https://youtu.be/2zrbaEHomag?t=2h13m39s) appears to have little connection to the world of seventeenth-century theatrical dance. He works with an entirely modern step vocabulary, but the spirit of the hand gestures that he gives to the dancers and the chorus might reflect the idea of imitative dance without formal steps, “composed of gestures and demonstrations,” that Jean-Baptiste Dubos credited Lully with introducing into French opera.^[5] See the dancers in the vocal portion of the passacaille (https://youtu.be/UUhA7r-7mdc?t=2m45s); note also the gestures of the chorus at 3:47 and 5:47.

2.2 In both cases, choreographers and stage directors had to contend with Lully’s musical indications, determining how to match choreography to the music while also considering the characters, dramatic contexts, and stage directions. Zingg and stage director Marshall Pynkoski had a number of decisions to make regarding the passacaille in Persée due to the lack of clear stage directions and discrepancies between the original libretto and score.^[6] In the libretto, at the end of Act 5, scene 7, Persée petrifies his enemies, led by the rebellious Phinée, by showing them Medusa’s head; he then invokes Vénus’s arrival in song (the brief air “Cessons de redouter la Fortune cruelle”). The stage directions indicate that after Persée sings, Vénus descends on a gloire (“Le Palais de Vénus descend”), accompanied by l’Amour (Cupid), Hymen, and the Graces; scene 8 begins with Vénus’s récit, where she invites the mortals to join the gods in the Heavens. The 1682 published score, unlike the libretto, runs these scenes together and does not indicate Vénus’s descent: the passacaille follows Persée’s air, and immediately thereafter Vénus sings. These discrepancies raise several questions: Was the passacaille intended to be danced? If so, by whom, or was it instead meant to accompany the descent of Vénus? The sources provide little guidance. Nonetheless, the existence of Pécour’s duet choreography and the piece’s length (ninety-nine measures) do suggest that it was meant to be danced.^[7] Zingg and Pynkoski resolve some of these issues, incorporating five pairs of dancers after the opening duet (https://youtu.be/vpORinLnFug?t=1h59m11s) and bringing Vénus down during the last segment of the dance (at 1:59:49). Thus, their passacaille, which starts with a pair of dancing Ethiopian courtiers who represent the lovers Persée and Andromède, completes the transition (initiated in Persée’s air) from combat to love fulfilled, and culminates in apotheosis.

2.3 Jean-Claude Gallotta and dramaturge Robert Carsen faced fewer contradictions between libretto and score in their Armide collaboration; nevertheless, these sources do not specify numbers of dancers or specific expressive gestures or steps. Some form of group choreography, perhaps with alternation between soloists or pairs based on changes in orchestration, as Pierce and Thorp hypothesize for Persée,^[8] might be inferred from the length of  the music, which starts with an extended instrumental passacaille that alternates segments for full orchestra with segments for woodwind trio, and then seamlessly flows into passages for vocal soloist and chorus with instrumental interludes, all over the same ostinato bass.^[9] Gallotta’s stylized, sinuous, playful, modern ensemble choreography matches the slightly ironic, distanced mood of the staging while also attending to details of orchestration and ensemble. Gallotta and Carsen had no interest in even a nod to Pécour’s choreography, here exquisitely danced by Catherine Turocy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq1pZhJ2EKs. In view of this production’s modern frame—the prologue and an added epilogue show Renaud as a Versailles tourist overcome by sleep, who climbs into Louis XIV’s bed and dreams the whole story—and the fact that the choreography Turocy performs may have served primarily as a showpiece for Mademoiselle Subligny’s 1701–1702 London performances and not as part of the full opera, Gallotta’s choreography makes artistic, if not historical, sense.

2.4 Armide has instructed her followers to keep an enamored Renaud occupied until she returns. While it is possible to see Pécour’s choreography as embodying an elegant seduction for Renaud’s entertainment, this perspective relies on an audience’s ability and willingness to appreciate the subtle and intimate use of space and the competing levels of rhythm and phrasing between music and choreography.^[10] Gallotta infuses the whole with a dreamy eroticism: Renaud, shirt hanging open, watches from the bed, which slowly rotates with the inexorable ostinato of the passacaille, as the dancers intertwine with sinuous arms and supple bodies. What would a more historically informed choreography look like? Even if we assume that the Beauchamp-Feuillet step vocabulary conveyed the eroticized atmosphere of the dance to seventeenth-century audiences, can it possibly do so for present-day audiences? Exploring alternative staging options, and comparing Gallotta and Carsen’s staging and its deliberate counter-historical approach to Zingg and Pynkoski’s more deliberate nods to historical dance can help students develop critical tools for evaluating a range of seventeenth-century musical theater performances.

3. Comic antics, heroic love: two chaconnes

3.1 Cecile Roussat’s and Gudrun Skamletz’s chaconne choreographies for the productions by Le Poème Harmonique offer yet another approach. Both draw on elements of Baroque step vocabulary but with departures meant to highlight in the first instance the commedia dell’arte slapstick humor of the “Chaconne d’Arlequin” and in the second the deliberate exoticism of the dancing Africans who follow Cadmus. Cecile Roussat’s choreography leaves space for dancer Julian Lubeck as Arlequin (Harlequin) to insert slapstick humor in the spirit of existing eighteenth-century choreographies for Arlequin. Musicians and dancers play with the basic harmonic pattern of the chaconne as Arlequin enters the scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpNAenQ9zls), and the strains of the chaconne performed here are redolent with sensuality, as the Musicienne Italienne is captivated by Arlequin’s physicality and forgets the tender wooing of the Scaramouche.

3.2 Skamletz’s chaconne in Cadmus for eight, rather than the original nine, “Africans” and two Giants was meant to convey Cadmus’s love to the captive Hermione (https://youtu.be/IqJZPzi_Odw). Skamletz’s approach raises several important questions: How, on the modern stage, might we represent the racial and cultural differences called for in the libretto, in view of the impact of such representations today? What would a seventeenth-century French audience member have understood by the term “Affriquain”? Did the first choreographers rely on the vocal sections to communicate Cadmus’s love, opting for an ordinary rather than imitative choreography? In this production, the visual coding of the costumes inspired by period practice blends the feathers associated with Native American costume with masks, dreadlocks, and painted body-stockings to create a hybrid exoticism. Skamletz exploits this in her rather free approach to movement, mixing Baroque steps with shoulder shimmies and hip-wiggles from the lexicon of African American dance à la Josephine Baker.

3.3 While each of the productions discussed here takes historically informed musical performance as a starting point, not even the most self-consciously historical of the productions (those of Le Poème Harmonique) can recreate the original (nor do they try to do so). Each production aims for effective theater and each is grounded in the early twenty-first century. Any one of them can work in the classroom, where they can provoke questions of staging, representation, the nature of stage performance, and the role of historical imagination in historically informed performance. The original context for these works is unrecoverable, but even for modern audiences these performances present eloquent bodies and rhetorically powerful renditions of the scores, opening this repertory to a wider public.

Appendix

Appendix. Lully’s stage works on DVD