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Dateline: 16th November, 2008
Lepage at Sadler's Wells Robert Lepage is to join with dancer Sylvie Guillem and choreographer Russell Maliphant to create a new piece for Sadler's Wells. Eonnagata will run from 2nd to 8th March (previews from 26th to 28th February). It tells the story of the Chevalier d’Éon, Charles de Beaumont - diplomat, writer, swordsman and a member of the King's Secret, a network of spies under the control of Louis XV. De Beaumont was perhaps the first spy to use transvestitism in the furtherance of his duties and until the day he died his true gender was a source of constant speculation, even provoking public bets in the late 18th century. According to Lepage's website, "De Beaumont's extravagantly swashbuckling life serves as the jumping off point for a project in which the sword is juxtaposed with the courtesan’s fan (or the courtesan is juxtaposed with the combatant), but in which our main purpose is to explore the idea of one sex representing the other through the notion of gender rather than through the more familiar approach of treating transvestitism as a sexual practice. In our investigations, Onnagata (a Kabuki theatre technique in which male actors represent women in an extremely stylized fashion) will supply most of the formal vocabulary. "Beyond the usual demands of dance, the collaboration presents the challenge of linking together abstraction, contemporary dance, and the narrative tendencies of the theatre. To what point is it possible to tell a story through movement?"
Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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