Michèle-Anne De Mey
SINFONIA EROICA

choreography: Michèle-Anne De Mey
assistants to Michèle Anne De Mey : Gregory Grosjean, Johanna O'Keefe
assistant & musical adviser: Thierry De Mey
performers: Stefan Baier, Géraldine Fournier, Ilse Ghekiere, Gabriella Iacono, Mylèna Leclercq, Adrien Le Quinquis, Eléonore Valére, Gabor Varga, Sandy Wiliams
music: W. A. Mozart, L. Von Beethoven, Jimi Hendrix
scenography: Michel Thuns
lighting: Simon Siegmann
costumes: Isabelle Lhoas
production: Charleroi/Danses, Centre chorégraphique de la Communauté française

Perhaps nothing could define the show better than the image of a relay runner handing over the baton to his team-mate: the combining of musical and choreographic phrases taken from here and there, an interplay of crossings, glidings and parallel and different movements, recounting to us the eternal story of man and woman, of couples forming and splitting, of the group versus the couple, and drawing for us the changing yet immortal figure of the hero. The alternating of playful and serious moments, of what is danced and what is not danced, of movement and contemplation, where energy espouses emotion and where gestures form onebody with the music.
In Sinfonia Eroica, couples form and split up, with one woman remaining by necessity single, during stories that are suggested rather than focused on. I am attempting to bring into play what these stories trigger outside the couple, to see male complicity compared with female complicity, to grasp the relationship established between the bodies of the men and the women in the dance. I also question the idea of an everyday hero, and the heroic aspect of the couple and the group. How does one become a hero in life, and how does one become a hero from the moment one is designated as such in the eyes of others?
Created in 1990, Sinfonia Eroica will be performed sixteen years later, in June 2006 in Charleroi, and will set off on new tours. I wanted to revive Sinfonia because I am very fond of it: this show has been important for me, for my work and for the life of the company. The audience also gave it an extraordinary welcome.
I decided to take a new team of dancers to re-create this dance according to my memory of it, and to take the same path we did when we created it at the time, without deciding a priori to update it. I would have had the impression of missing a stage by deciding that from the outset.
In Sinfonia there is a way of approaching the group relationship and the relationship with the stage which is specific to my way of working and which is as valid today as it was in the past.
It is a show whose every aspect - musical, dramatic and scenographic - has been worked out in depth but which is essentially based on the collective impetus and energy which the group produces on the stage, giving it a form of innocence and lightness that is magical. This magic is what I wanted to recreate.

Michèle Anne De Mey