À La Rochelle, il n'y a pas que des pucelles...

[In La Rochelle, there are not only virgins…] 

Behind this title with its merry rhyme, the amalgam of a sea shanty –  “Les Filles de La Rochelle” (The Girls of La Rochelle) – and of the name of a trawler anchored in the port of La Rochelle – the “Pucelle des mers” (the “Virgin of the seas”) – Régine Chopinot delivers a “cruel tale” with a nautical flavour, as her first creation as director of the Centre chorégraphique régional de Poitou-Charentes (Regional Choreography Centre of Poitou-Charentes) in La Rochelle.

She calls on a set designer, Didier Perréton, for the first time, whose stage device contributes to the narration. On the stage, a brilliant fabric hung under the fly system reflects the dancers and makes them turn 45 degrees: “The shimmering cloth above the dancers in the darkness of the first tableau? (…) more like battle fields, the time of wars where the horses’ hooves raised clouds of billowing dust. A bit like the Battleship Potemkin…” [1]. This stage device would later be developed on a monumental scale in the set design for “ANA” (1990). A map in green and ochre is drawn on the floor, “like in school textbooks” the choreographer would specify, while the cardboard walls rise up to form a room in which remote-controlled spiders and boats sit, evocations of the universe populated with the pipe dreams of a child’s bedroom.

In this bestiary ballet, vaguely narrative, Régine Chopinot plays a ring master who would orchestrate a modern flood: “I play the role of fate a little” she explains in an interview given to Lise Brunel, “that which makes the transition between the destruction of society and the discovery of the animals, which happens at the end of the world” [2]. The eight dancers, transformed into animals using headdress-masks which proved the finishing touches to the jumpsuits armed with tails and wings, costumes invented     by the fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier – each one adopting the costume corresponding to his Chinese astrological sign – leaving for a better world, fleeing chaos of the work.

Deeply affected by the Chernobyl disaster and the attacks which affected France at the time, Régine Chopinot took legends from the historical French provinces of Aunis and Saintonge and the pitiless universe which they evoke – that of the sailors’ relationship with the ocean which nourishes them, carries them, soothes them and destroys them, but also with the storms and the wreckers – warning: only the animals will survive.

[1] Interview with Lise Brunel, « La Pucelle des mers », Le Matin, 12 December 1986.
[2] Interview with Lise Brunel, op. cit.

Programme extract

“It is a cruel tale about the worst aspects of modernity, above all about the bloody and revolting, the foolish and absurd, about the topicality of these last months. A look at a world right in the middle of a phase of collective decay. As often used in order to “ape” the humans, the characters here are animals. Nine animals, which are no more animals than we are, who board cardboard cut-outs in order to reach a “new world”. Adventures, pirouettes, storms and the turbulent environment of the end of the human world… Who, among these survivors, will reach, will have deserved to reach, this new promised land? Does it exist? A morality tale, an angry outburst too… »

Aline Apostolska, programme from the Cargo, Grenoble (February 1987)

Updating: February 2013