Faced with a world anxiously clinging to its traditions, we wanted to ask contemporary artists and musicians to shift our perspective with one of the 17th century’s most codified dances, the chaconne. “This dive into the baroque era naturally echoed my education in the Paris Opera Ballet corps,” explained Raphaëlle Delaunay. “The baroque period tried to say: a world where all the opposites would be harmoniously possible. It turned conflict into a principle of harmony. What dissonances could we compose with today? With irreverence, but with a desire to return all the verve and symbolic force to the body, I image a court ballet in 2015. A duet accompanied by Sébastien D’Hérin on the harpsichord and two other musicians.

Source : Les Subsistances

More information : http://raphaelledelaunay.com/

‘I rarely turn round to see if I'm being followed. If someone is dancing behind me, they're dancing in my shadow. For a long time I didn't want to see the traces I left behind me. I still don't know what that fear was. Maybe it was the need to escape being classified, identified.

Always ahead!

And then this digital breakaway makes me want to share the route I'm lucky enough to have. It's a journey of instinct, of the desire to constantly discover new terrain, new bodies, new ways of doing and thinking.

Being here and there in a world that constantly asks you to identify yourself seemed to me to be an opportunity: an opportunity for richness, eclecticism, variety of forms and curiosity.

I started at the age of 10 at the Paris Opera, which I left at 20 to dance with Pina Bausch, then with Alain Platel, then... then... then... my own creations with themes as different as... and right up to this work on icons such as Joséphine Baker, Michael Jackson or Beyoncé.

It's this diversity that I want to tell you about in movement, in the joy of dance, in the shifts that my life as a dancer takes me on.

This is the moment I'm offering you, the moment of a body going through very different, not to say contradictory, states, the moment of a body searching... And with a single aim, to continue to discover and nourish my insatiable desire to dance. ’

Raphaëlle Delaunay

Source and more information: https://www.raphaelledelaunay.fr/