Resumen de Une passion de Bach en mouvement: Hybridation et choralité dans Pitié !, d’Alain Platel and Fabrizio Cassol
: In 2008, Les Ballets C de la B presented Pitié!, by Alain Platel, after Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (1729). Two years after the creation of vsprs, a show adapted from Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin, the Flemish choreographer, a prominent figure of theBelgian «boom» in the 1980s, joined forces again with jazzman Fabrizio Cassol, staging this time the Leipzig cantor’s masterpiece. Initially trained as a remedial educationalist, Alain Platel was fascinated by the hysterical body. He has been described as a choreographer of the outcast, a virtuoso of suffering, an esthete of the ordinary, a master at orchestrating differences. He himself coined the term «bastard dance» to qualify his art, implicitly inviting us to examine his work in relation to expressive borders. Pitié! is itself a hybrid piece in many regards, and the purpose of this paper is to analyse it as such, with a special emphasis on its choral aspects, bothvocal and danced. Historically, many choreographers and directors have wished to stage Bach’s Passions. To state a few, Georges Balanchine directed the St. Matthew (1943), Pier Luigi Pizzi, later Yuri Lyubimov and Christian Pöppelreiter, and recently Robert Wilson the St. John(respectively, 1984, 1985 and 2007). Staged one year after Wilson’s version, Pitié! demonstrates a very different type of approach. Platel did not limit himself to applying his own theatre aesthetics to Bach’s work. Together with Cassol, they submitted the piece to «a sort of strip-tease»: the Evangelist role disappered together with his recitatives, some of the remaining numbers were left apart and others redistributed between three lyrical soloists and a chorus formed of C de la B dancers. On this basis, Fabrizio Cassol adapted and re-orchestrated the originalscore in a jazzy and worldly music style, aiming at «[exposing] the innermost part, the “guts” [of the biblical narrative]», in Platel’s own words. It follows that nearly all vocal parts in Pitié! are performed by three main characters: The Mother, The Son and The Soulmate, another female character. Other musical movements, solo or group numbers in Bach’s original, are left to the chorus. The length of the new piece is somewhat less than two hours (i.e., nearly a third less than the original). In order to examine the dramatic structure designed by Platel and Cassol, we first evaluate to what extent their piece stands out as a hybrid dramatic form. The integration oftraditional stage disciplines (dance, theatre and singing), and formal categories inherent to the bachian oratorio (recitative, arioso and aria, commentary and turba choruses, choral and grand chorus) into a necessarily impure scenic experience are explored. Furthermore, based on the study of three sequences from the show, we examine how the choreographer has conveyed, as well as transformed, the relationship between the individual and the group, hence emphasizing and extending some of the baroque aspectspresent in Bach’s work. Finally, at the frontier of the profane and the sacred, we question the political meaning of a work that seems essentially dedicated to pain and suffering, as well as Platel’s ability to unveil «the inside of things» and renew the sacredness of the St. Matthew Passion, without making «a religious show».
