Prélude à la mer

Creators: Thierry De Mey, Claude Debussy, Orchestre de l'ORTF, Michèle Anne De Mey

Prélude à l'après midi d'un faune" (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), set to music by Claude Debussy after a text by Stéphane Mallarmé, is a sublime musical poem about ephemerality, absence and disappearance. A faun wonders if the nymphs who have escaped his amorous assiduities were, after all, nothing but a chimera: did I love a dream?...To perpetuate these nymphs, to make the ephemeral last, to appropriate what can only disappear... Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's choreography, performed by two "dream" dancers Marc Lorimer and Cynthia Loemij, confronts the harshness of a catastrophic location: the site of an endangered sea, the Aral Sea. An androgynous "faun" (a play on male/female substitution) loses himself in the impossible quest to hold on to what can only disappear. He/she traces the movements of his/her unfulfillment, wandering through the imprint of the sea that once was...: salt steppe, cracked landscapes, sandstorms, shipwreck cemeteries, lighthouses in the middle of the desert, ghostly villages silted up by the wind. source: CBA