Ghosts, ballet after Les Revenants

Ghosts Choreographic adaptation of Revenants by Henrik Ibsen Cina Espejord, choreography Marit Moum Aune, director Nils Petter Molvær, Music Even Børsum, set design Ingrid Nylander, costume Kristin Bredal, lighting designer Nils Petter Molvaer, trumpet Jan Bang, DJ Norwegian National Ballet dancers and the Norwegian National Ballet School With Andreas Heise (Osvald / Mr Alving) Camilla Spidsøe (Mrs. Alving) Grete Sofie Borud Nybakken (Regine) Yoshifumi Inao (Engstrand) Ole Willy Falkhaugen (Pastor Manders) The Norwegian National Ballet offers a choreographic adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. A convoluted family story, haunted by the image of a missing father. An intimate drama, woven around a mother and her son, which exposes a maze of emotions, populated by specters and ghosts. The play Les Revenants caused a scandal upon its publication in 1881. And for good reason, the themes addressed are debated: rape, incest, syphilis, euthanasia... Through these evils, Ibsen slays the bourgeois hypocrisy and the Puritan morality of his time. His characters collide with secrets and lies, and revelations burst into faces. The past becomes present in everyone’s consciousness. The National Ballet of Norway is made up of around sixty dancers from more than twenty countries. A most eclectic European company whose repertoire oscillates from Marius Petipa to Paul Lightfoot, via Jiří Kylián and John Neumeier. Ingrid Lorentzen has been leading the company since 2012. With Ghosts, the young dancer and choreographer Cina Espejord manipulates a tortured universe in which the protagonists evolve as if crushed under the weight of convention. Thus, the poignant Régine (Grete Sofie B. Nybakken) refuses the condition intended for her by her father (brilliant Kristian Alm) and does not hesitate, for that, to trample on him furiously. Destructive, frenzied passions bordering on madness. Dancers, with rare precision, continue to chain virtuoso pas de deux, between high lifts and tormented expressions. Special mention to the blackberry Camilla Spidsøe (Ms. Alving and mother of Oswald) who sweats with eroticism and the unspoken. The solos and duets follow one another and plunge us into the universe of the repressed. The bodies are accentuated and the faces tense, like that of the sick son who suffers, excellently interpreted by Andreas Heise. The arms roll up, pass under and between the legs, the columns bend. But this forbidden love irritates and triggers a heated debate, during a meal punctuated by the din of cutlery. Allied to the director Marit Moum Aune, Cina Espejord makes silent, extinct beings express themselves, but whose clarity of movement carries the viewer away. The minimalist decorations, punctuated by table entrances and exits as well as chairs dragged on the ground, add a touch of fatalism to this daily life of already palpable tension. Worn by the Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer and DJ Jan Bang, Ghosts can be heard like a pulse of life interspersed with electronic elements. A powerful and ruthless piece.