Whether you’re a hip hop fan, a Baroque music aficionado, a film buff, a ballet faithful, or a theatre lover, well, let’s just say if you have any interest in performing arts and want to watch a extravagant, crazy, and imaginative performance that has succeeded in mixing and blending various genres, and opening your mind and freeing your imagination, you will enjoy La Fete’s closing act “Rameau’s Bossa Fataka” by Cie Montalvo-Hervieu.

Choreographer Jose Montalvo and dancer Dominique Hervieu started their collaboration in 1981, and their works have been acclaimed for fluidity, volatility, speed, and accuracy. Seven years later, they formed Cie Montalvo-Hervieu and have since entertained and enthralled audiences and critics with their physical virtuosity and visual tricks at New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), London’s Barbican Centre, Edinburgh International Festival, and Melbourne International Arts Festival. In other words, they’ve been to a number of performing arts meccas of the world, and, well, never here until now.

Back home, in 1998, they were appointed dance directors of the Centre chorégraphique National de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne, and continued training and education of the dance art and organized a number of original and unique activities, helping the public to understand the art more deeply. In June 2000, Montalvo and Hervieu were respectively named director of dance and director of young audience programs and public activities at the Théâtre national de Chaillot in Paris, and later awarded the "Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres".

“Rameau’s Bossa Fataka”

This mysterious title links a poem by the founder of Dada movement Hugo Ball and the name of a great composer at the court of King Louise XIV Jean-Philippe Rameau. It may sound irrelevant at first but when you think of the elements of expressive collage, assemblage, photo editing and poetry of the sounds, it makes much sense. The virtuoso dancers fly between dream and reality, gamboling freely at full speed in front of the moving images of the Chateau de Versailles, the grey towers of Créteil, interacting with those of elephants and kangaroos.

“Rameau’s Bossa Fataka” premiered in 2006, and has toured extensively throughout France, and been to, among others, Barcelona, Dusseldorf, Geneva, and Rome, where Il Tempo newspaper’s critic said, “I suppose you could say that the result is a Babel of different musical languages. And the most important point is that, thanks to the cheerful jollity of all the varied performers, although the total effect is a kind of babble, it genuinely is a very happy babble.”

This is the “Bossa Fataka”’s first trip outside Europe, and Bangkok is part of their Asian tour which also includes Wuhan, Beijing, Hong Kong, Jakarta and Manila. Yes, we’ll get to watch it before Tokyo, Singapore, London, and New York. And, please, don’t leave your kids at home: this performance will give them many good dreams.

 

“Rameau’s Bossa Fataka” is at Thailand Cultural Center’s Main Hall, tomorrow (June 26) and Friday (June 27) at 8pm. Tickets are from Bt 500 to Bt 2,000 (Bt 100 for students), available at Thaiticketmajor webiste and outlets. For more, www.Montalvo-Hervieu.com, and www.LaFete-Bangkok.com.

written by Pawit Mahasarinand

 

published in Daily Xpress on Wednesday, June 25, 2008

 

photos by Laurent Phillippe, courtesy of the Embassy of France