Eonnagata

Sylvie Guillem, Robert Lepage i Russell Maliphant

Dance The Chevalier d'Eon was one of the first spies of Louis XV and, perhaps, the first to use transvestitism to conceal his identity. His ambiguous character and his unlimited ambition earned him many enemies, including King Louis XVI himself. His extravagant life full of adventures serves as the starting point for a project in which the sword is juxtaposed with the courtesan’s fan, with the main object of exploring the idea of a sex that represents the other thorough gender and does not, as is often the case, treat transvestitism just as a sexual practice. In this production, onnagata (a technique of the kabuki theatre in which the male actors play female roles) provides much of the formal vocabulary. In Eonnagata we find a mixture of styles and performances. Robert Lepage, the contemporary dance choreographer Russell Maliphant and Sylvie Guillem, former lead ballerina of the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, join forces to go beyond the usual challenges of dance and accept the challenge of combining abstraction, contemporary dance and the narrative tendencies of theatre. How far is it possible to tell a story through movement?