Press
The latest hallucinations of Lucas Cranach the Elder, from oil to flesh
At the Théâtre Les Tanneurs, the Mossoux-Bonté Company recreates one of its signature productions. Same plot, new cast, revisited soundtrack to explore the world of the German Renaissance painter.
On the darkened stage is a huge panel pierced by eight windows. One of them lights up, revealing a woman dressed in thick red brocade fabric. Motionless, she slowly comes to life. In another square, what looks like a religious dignitary exercises his authority next to a fish, while in the lower right, the fingers of a woman, whose head and legs are nowhere to be seen, are running through a voluminous ancient book. A woman drags the blade of a dagger across her torso, looking for the best place to thrust it.
One after the other, the frames light up and each of the images that inhabit them becomes a living character. One hand disappears from a frame, another appears elsewhere. Each character seems to lead its own life and, at times, a similar movement spreads from frame to frame. Sometimes, two images dialogue, interact, respond to each other. Some frames accommodate two characters and a scene plays out between them.
It all began in 1988, when Nicole Mossoux and Patrick Bonté, while on tour in London, discovered a portrait of a princess painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553). They were struck by the ambiguity emanating from the princess’s look and pose - typical of Cranach, who liked to cultivate confusion -, who could just as easily be a saint as well as a murderous shrew. Hence the idea of going beyond the portrait by imagining her story before she posed, or her fate after the painting is finished. In 1990, the Mossoux-Bonté Company created De ultieme gevoelens van Lucas Cranach de Oude in Tilburg in the Netherlands. Performed more than 150 times across Europe over 25 years, it has become one of the emblematic productions in the company's work on image and detail.
The latest hallucinations of Lucas Cranach the Elder retains this atmosphere dominated by humour, eroticism and the mystery of the characters' presence. The stage set-up and dramaturgy are identical to those of the original work, but there has been no transmission between the original and new cast. Everything has been re-improvised, yet some of the sequences are the same, while others have been added or transformed. However, Thomas Turine, who has adapted Christian Genet's original score to suit modern tastes, worked in close collaboration with the latter.
The show's remarkable aesthetics play on the contrast between light and dark, the axes and angles of view, with a life that can be guessed outside the frame, the attitudes, the postures of the characters. And while there is no question of reproducing the master's paintings as such, the references to Saint George, Adam and Eve, Madonnas with child, Lucretia and Venus at the spring are unmistakable. The dancers - Dorian Chavez, Colline Libon, Lenka Luptáková, Frauke Mariën and Eléonore Valère-Lachky - shine with the precision and intensity of their interpretation.
Didier Béclard, Le Suricate / December 2024
Three decades after [The last hallucinations of Lucas Cranach the Elder], a new generation of performers take on the painter’s universe. The actors embody every shiver that runs through these sequences of living images with great precision. All the sensations are conveyed by their bodies in a performance of great technique and extraordinary poetry. While some of the original scenes have been transformed and others added, the atmosphere remains the same, plunging us into a dream where madness, delirium, eroticism and humour come together to a rethought and electrifying soundtrack.
In these paintings, more than just bodies, every bit of skin becomes a sign carrying meaning. The image has a rhythm, a thought, a momentum. If the painter created it and the theatre gave it movement, it retains all its autonomy, it becomes alive. And from picture to picture, the spectator travels between intensities. In each frame, the action is precise and absorbs us. The figures move in a hypnotic dance that will touch each spectator in a unique way.
Louis Thiébaut, RTBF.be / December 2024
Imagine a museum at night. Locked inside, you wander through the darkened rooms. Fascinated by the portrait of a young princess, you stop to contemplate it longer. And then you suddenly have the impression that she has moved, turned her head slightly, perhaps she send you a signal. Soon, all the paintings around you give you the same sensation. Locked in their frames for centuries, bishops, princesses, heroes and heroines, mothers with children and even Adam and Eve seem determined to free themselves from their eternal immobility (...).
Is it the memory of their past or the desire to experience the real world that sets them in motion? Who knows? But once they have tasted this new-found freedom, they want to go further: to leave the frame and set out to discover the world.
Jean-Marie Wynants, Le Soir / December 2024