VSPRS A creation by Les Ballets C. de la B.for dancers, singers and instrumentalists

In his new creation vsprs Alain Platel is exploring new ground. After his involvement with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (Iets op Bach) and Mozart (Wolf, first performed at the RuhrTriennale 2003) he is turning his attention to the vespers (Vespro della Beata Vergine) composed by Claudio Monteverdi in 1610. Platel was just sixteen when he heard the work for the first time, performed in a church in Ghent »on authentic baroque instruments which were slightly out of tune after each movement.«
The perception of the protagonists in vsprs also seems to be warped, distorted and disturbed. The world Platel and his ensemble examine is that of the autistic, of Tourette's syndrome patients and hysterics. Inspired by the work of Oliver Sacks (Awakenings) and by the films the Belgian neurologist Arthur van Gehuchten made of patients at the University of Leuven in 1905, Les Ballets C. de of La B. investigate the behaviour and movement patterns of people forced to live in an isolated world by pathological defects.
Yet vsprs is in no way a medical case study; Alain Platel and his dancers transform these people’s conditions, their desire, rage, tenderness and dedication into the exclusivity of ecstasy. They penetrate the various stages of being rendered helpless, the physical and verbal expressions of which are strangely moving because they are evocative of the innocence of children. The spiritual mood of vsprs comes not least from Monteverdi’s Marian vespers, one of the main works of Western sacred music. Alain Platel asked the Belgian jazz saxophone player and composer Fabrizio Cassol to link Monteverdi’s music with the possibilities offered by jazz and musique tsigane.