Bruno Benne

As the title announces, Rapides is fast like the explosive and orderly vitality of Jordi Savall’s Water Music to which it is performed, or like the perfectly designed waterworks of baroque fountains. Bruno Benne has chosen a new generation of 10 dancers whose ever-renewed energy echoes the glowing power of the music and embodies this fruitful momentum. Although it has a certain timeless modernity, the choreography’s symmetry and profusion is inspired by 18th-century arts. It is a fascinating orchestrated vision of dance, which multiplies space and time and hypnotic variations, and responds to the looping effects in the musical score created by composer Youri Bessières. “To keep the baroque alive is to uphold a tradition and a legacy in perpetual movement”, contends Bruno Benne; Rapides certainly demonstrates this.

Bruno Benne graduated from the Paris Conservatory with a major in contemporary dance, and he founded the Beaux-Champs Company in 2013, where he interrogates the Baroque legacy through his resolutely contemporary vision. He has worked steadily with Béatrice Massin and Marie-Geneviève Massé since 2004, and he has also danced and reprised works by pioneering choreographer Francine Lancelot. Combining his research on Baroque art and the American minimalism of choreographer Lucinda Childs, he initiated his new vision of a streamlined Baroque aesthetics which is at the core of all his creations.