Compagnie maguy marin cinderella

SAN DIEGO — Whether they considered it “astonishingly original and magical” or “adolescent scribblings smeared over the surface of a poignant original,” there is one response the critics have not had to the iconoclastic production of “Cinderella” staged by the Lyon Opera Ballet. No one has been lukewarm.

“It is (choreographer) Maguy Marin’s remarkable achievement to have created a vision of lost childhood, of innocence seen from a distance,” raved New York Times critic Anna Kisselgoff in a review of the U.S. premiere of the evening-length ballet. The ballet opens Friday at the San Diego Civic Theatre, a presentation of the San Diego Foundation for Performing Arts.

Among those who objected at that time to the flashy “Cinderella,” Dance Magazine’s Camille Hardy took the Lyon Opera Ballet to task for “the pursuit of novelty for its own sake.”

When the ballet came to Los Angeles in 1989 The Times’ critic Martin Bernheimer admired the brilliant stagecraft, but complained of the production’s “bleak Expressionism” and said that it had “raped and trivialized” the Prokofiev score. Spliced into the original music are taped baby gurgles, the work of composer Jean Schwarz.

And, if that sounds avant-garde, consider that all of the dancers wear somewhat grotesque masks and lumpish padding, turning them into life-size dolls on the three-storied dollhouse set.

“It’s not only the story of Cinderella, it’s a story about childhood,” said Yorgos Loukos, Lyon Opera Ballet’s artistic director, speaking by telephone from Pittsburgh, where the company began a seven-city U.S. tour last weekend. “You see how rude children can be, how charming. . . . It’s a very magic world and also a cruel world.”

Loukos danced with the Theatre du Silence in Paris and Roland Petit’s National Ballet of Marseilles, before joining the Lyon Opera Balle

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Maguy Marin has been exploring the human condition through the body for four decades. One of the most important figures in French modern dance, Marin began as a classical dancer, first performing with the Ballet de Strasbourg and then with Maurice Béjart’s company, Ballet du XXe Siècle, before turning toward the avant-garde. Her breakout dance, May B, which premiered in 1981 and came to The Joyce in 1995, drew inspiration from the work of Samuel Beckett, the famed tragicomic playwright with whom Marin shared an interest in showcasing the absurd. But, like Beckett, Marin’s drive to push the boundaries of form is accompanied by a desire to push audiences to derive meaning in new ways. Her work is not an escape from the world, but an alternate way into it.

Following the success of May B, Marin continued to test the limits of dance while exploring social and political themes. In her 1985 version of Cinderella, made for the Lyon Opera Ballet and toured worldwide, she posed the question: Why must Cinderella become a princess to be happy? Marin recast the prince’s family as possessing as many cruel figures as are in Cinderella’s stepfamily, complicating the notion that wealth and happiness are inextricably intertwined. With You Can’t Eat The Applause, performed at The Joyce in 2004, Marin looked at oppressive forces impacting the lives of Latin Americans. Through tedious repetition, she made a point that violence had become so frequent, it was nearly routine.

As The New York Times has noted, “Marin has never let her deep interest in movement exploration dim her concern with how people live and what they do to one another.” In fact, her activism hasn’t been contained to the stage. In 1995, for instance, she participated in a hunger strike to protest a massacre that occurred during the Bosnian War. For Marin, the lines between protest in the theater and in real life are blurred. "The stage is part of

(b Toulouse, 2 Jun. 1951)

French dancer, choreographer, and company director. One of the most significant figures in the French new wave. She studied in Toulouse and Paris, performing with the Strasbourg Opera Ballet before moving to Brussels in 1970 to continue her studies at Béjart's school, Mudra. She joined his Ballet of the 20th Century (1974–7) and choreographed Yu-ku-ri for that company in 1976. In 1978 she won first prize at the Bagnolet choreographic competition and in the same year founded her own company, which in 1984 was renamed Compagnie Maguy Marin, resident first at Angers and from 2006 at Rillieux-la Pape. In addition to making dances for her own company, Marin has choreographed for the Paris Opera Ballet (Jaleo, 1983, for the experimental GRCOP, and 1988's Leçon de ténèbres for the main company); for Dutch National Ballet (Groosland, mus. Bach, 1989) and above all for Lyon Opera Ballet where she was resident choreographer between 1991 and 1994. One of her major successes there was Cinderella (1985), which set the familiar fairy-tale in a doll's house; this was followed by Coppélia (1993) which transferred the ballet to a depressed public housing estate. Marin's slant on the classical aesthetic was also evident in Groosland where a cast of padded ‘fat’ dancers satirized the sylph-like bodies of classical dancers. She also staged the Brecht/Weill The Seven Deadly Sins for Lyon in 1987. A list of her other works includes Contrastes (mus. Bartók, 1980), May B (mus. Schubert, Bryars, 1981, based on the writings of Samuel Beckett), Babel Babel (mus. Mahler, 1982), Calambre (mus. Rayon, 1985), Waterzooi (mus. Denis Mariotte, 1993), RamDam (mus. Mariotte, 1995), Umwelt (2005), and Turba (2007).

http://www.compagnie-maguy-marin.fr Website for the Marin company