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Eonnagata
Career diplomat and part-time soldier, the Chevalier d’Éon (Charles de Beaumont) was one of Louis XV’s first spies and perhaps the first to use transvestitism in the furtherance of his duties. His equivocal character and nonconformism earned him plenty of enemies, including Louis XVI who, convinced that he really was a woman, placed him under the legal obligation to wear a dress in public. His extravagantly swashbuckling life serves as the jumping off point for a project in which the sword is juxtaposed with the courtesan’s fan (or the courtesan is juxtaposed with the combatant), but in which our main purpose is to explore the idea of one sex representing the other through the notion of gender rather than through the more familiar approach of treating transvestitism as a sexual practice. In our investigations, Onnagata (a Kabuki theatre technique in which male actors represent women in an extremely stylized fashion) will supply most of the formal vocabulary.
The project brings together an intriguing variety of creative imaginations and performers: Lepage, contemporary choreographer Russell Maliphant, and Sylvie Guillem, former principal dancer of Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris. Beyond the usual demands of dance, their collaboration presents the challenge of linking together abstraction, contemporary dance, and the narrative tendencies of the theatre. To what point is it possible to tell a story through movement?
Eonnagata is currently in development and will be presented in Europe and North America beginning in February 2009.
Witness the work in progress by viewing the video clip which is made up of images of the filming of the documentary featuring Sylvie Guillem, directed by Françoise Ha Van and produced by À Droite de la Lune.
