La Batie – Geneva Festival
Win 15×2 tickets for La Bâtie – Geneva Festival, from August 25 to September 11.
To win:
– 5×2 tickets for Rodrigo Leão August 26 at 8:30 p.m. at the Alhambra
The Strange Beauty of Life
Musique
First musical artist invited to perform this year at La Bâtie, Rodrigo Leão opens the doors of the Alhambra to all possibilities. The Portuguese composer, driven by an insatiable thirst for discovery, surprises with each album release with his incredible ability to combine genres and draw inspiration from all musical cultures. Rodrigo develops in his compositions an enveloping softness, an atmosphere worthy of the best dark rooms to tell us stories, sometimes also through the voice of prestigious guests such as Stuart Staples, Beth Gibbons or Neil Hannon. There is in his music a form of benevolent nostalgia which transports us elsewhere, in a softer and more accomplished world. His latest album, A Estranha Beleza da Vida, which can be translated as “the strange beauty of life”, once again illustrates this feeling of well-being and freedom. Marked with delicacy and lightness, his new pieces manage to tear us from our heaviness for the time of a listening and, certainly, of a concert.
– 5×2 for Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui August 31, 8:30 p.m. at Château Rouge, Annemasse
FAUN / NOETIC
Danse
It embodies dance in the present and the mixing of genres. They say he is a magician. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, new director of the Ballet du Grand Théâtre, presents on the magnificent stage of Château Rouge two pieces emblematic of his transformations: Faun and Noetic.
From Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun, the choreographer revived colors, materials and sounds in 2009, inviting composer Nitin Sawhney to echo Debussy with his own musical language, and stylist Hussein Chalayan to design the costumes accompanying the movements of the dancers in an intense and current sensuality. With Noetic, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui signed in 2015 a fourth collaboration with Antony Gormley to evoke the intuitive paths of knowledge. The visual artist had then designed flexible carbon fiber slats emphasizing the fluidity of the dance, the percussions and the voices. Splendidly immersed in the complexity of thought, Noetic distilled a touch of humanity into science. With Faun, they are today the two sides of an evening which shines the new repertoire of the Ballet du Grand Théâtre.
A 2022 revival, in co-production with Château Rouge.
This revival was created as part of a partnership between Château Rouge and the Grand Théâtre de Genève.
Duration 120′ / With intermission
For all
– 5×2 for Lionel Dray & Clemence Jeanguillaume September 2 at 9 p.m., Pitoëff Theater
So the fight
Theater
Under this funny title hatches a story made up of enigmas. Small sketches placed end to end and oddities sublimate the banal to “get very close to the splendor of life”. It is from Kafka that Lionel Dray borrows this sentence which dictates the writing of his Thus the fight, a transposition into aphorisms of short stories and episodes from the life of the Prague man. Set to a score inspired by the third movement of Shostakovich’s eighth symphony, masterful in tension, anguish and bursts of joy, the staging takes his character through absurd scenes full of tears that the actor avoids a Tati-like sway or by an impassive Keatonian acrobatics. Here and there, nods to Chris Marker or Dalí that we recognize or guess, divert our thoughts towards an unexpected gem… We laugh, we are afraid. We are lost. Thus the fight guides us in the footsteps of Kafka with a tightrope walker who knows no path, very precisely next to reality. To the right of the anonymous, to the left of the invisible, in the hidden face of the banal. Where it shines.
Duration 70′
From 12 years old