Octave gives free reins to some illustrators to portray their way the 19/20 Season, by revisiting one show poster of their choice. Bérénice Milon decided to illustrate the ballet Body and Soul by Crystal Pite.

From one ballet to another, the Canadian choreographer, Crystal Pite, powerfully deploys a universe in which zest for life ceaselessly confronts its darker side. Bodies traversed by contrary forces, individuals in a struggle with the outside world, communities alternately united and in conflict: Crystal Pite’s aesthetics transfigure on the stage the relationships that run through our lives. Fascinated by the “natural world and the beauty and brutality that it contains”, this choreographer explores with relentless passion the same group of themes. We look back over the creative universe of Crystal Pite through five of her works.

Is the group a cocoon or a spider’s web, a refuge or a danger? In a natural world in which our gregarious instinct holds a strong attraction, will the individual have the strength to find itself? The title of this ballet, which was first performed in 2009, refers to a book by Steven Johnson that compares the different ways in which humans and insects manage groups. How does order emerge in the heart of nature? Combining human figures and the silhouettes of insects in an aggressive and worrying ensemble, Crystal Pite gives flesh to the affects and impulses that set us moving. She admits to being fascinated by the thirst for unity (fusion, eurythmy) which resounds strongly in all of us, but which can also swallow us up. With a love for choreographing big ensembles with the potential to embody contagion phenomena (a stimulus spreading through an entity that mutates, changes structure, evolves like a flock of birds in full flight), Crystal Pite allows us to experience, in ballets that are often epic, the multiple conflicts that lie at the heart of nature.

A double meaning for the title of this ballet first performed in 2009. Both an evocation of dark matter, “the unexplored territory of our era” according to Crystal Pite: the group of forces that act the universe as a whole. And also the position of the choreographer: “dark matters”, in other words darkness is precisely what counts, what it is important to apprehend in order to have a better grasp of the mysterious forces at work in our souls and our bodies. We are thus caught up in an holistic entity, a single release of waves and obscure movements. In order to embody this permanent game of creation and destruction, Crystal Pite chose to stage a group of puppeteers dressed in black in the style of Bunraku. But the wooden figure they control plays no less an active part in this same process. In its turn, it reverses the roles and turns against its creator. What part do free will and manipulation play in our lives? Is the dancer capable of attaining the grace of a puppet by renouncing his/her own impulses? These question, which are not without reminding us of Kleist’s major text (On Puppet Theatre), in a subterranean way, are at work within all of Crystal Pite’s ballets.

First performed in 2011, The Tempest Replica duplicates on stage the world invented by Shakespeare, a world both magical and interiorised. The universe of the The Tempest is here “replied to” or duplicated, unfolding in two parallel spaces. The outline of the story is presented in a minimalistic way in the manner of a storyboard, on an island reduced to the scale of a model, by white faceless bodies as if their faces had not yet been drawn. In a completely different, urban and contemporary landscape, fully fleshed-out characters dance a series of portraits (Prospero, Ariel, Caliban...), developing the motifs and emotions only lightly sketched by the chalk figures. The articulations of these marionettes are also the articulations of the narrative, which the characters duplicate as they embody them. The story on one side, the bodies on the other, meet and influence each other: games of imitation and manipulation in the midst of the tempest, all themes that run through this choreographer’s work, underpinned here by an imaginative scenography that presents them in the form of theatre that is as narrative and figurative as it gets: for Crystal Pite, the totem of abstraction no longer has any reason for being.

In an orange light, an individual emerges from a wave of interwoven human bodies amid the ramifications of Vivaldi strings, multiplied by Max Richter’s rewriting: a fugal writing process, in “canon”, sets off a series of chain reactions, of echoing gestures and counter-rhythms through the dancers and the sounds. In this 2016 ballet, Crystal Pite offers us a striking image of nature as matrix: both the source of germination, mutation and transformation and as a closed space from which one must partially extricate oneself: the fascination of synchrony, unity and imitation (“man is a mimetic animal”, says Aristotle) but also the opposite desire to detach oneself from the suffocating effect of the herd. Nature is presented here as a struggle: at its heart an incessant conflict ensues, which questions the human group as a whole and the place of each individual.

In 1836, Nicolas Gogol imagined a play, in the style of a farce, about an inspector general. This revisor (the original title of the play) is sent by the Czar to inspect a local administration. A young traveller, who happens to be in the area, is mistaken for the dreaded functionary: he then reveals all the pettiness and corruption but finds himself, in his turn, caught up in the web of his own growing power. In a choreographic rereading of this farce, Crystal Pite explores the relationship between words and bodies. The ballet stages an entire gallery of costumed characters who react, through movement, to a recording of the play performed by a group of actors. The interplay between words and gestures (exaggerations, discrepancies, contradictions...) renews, in the register of the grotesque and of black comedy, the theme of free will and of the puppet: are we manipulated by words or master of our affects? Or is it always something more obscure that pulls the strings?

In the third act of Body and Soul, created for the Paris Opera Ballet in 2019, Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite questions the organisation of life in society through the metaphor of a community of insect-like creatures. The dancers take on the appearance of beings from another world, equipped with claws. More than just a decorative accessory, these are true extensions to their limbs, fully integrated into the choreography. Bernard Connan, head of the costume decoration workshop at the Palais Garnier, participated in the design of these unusual elements. On the occasion of the ballet's revival, he looks back on his encounter and exchanges with the choreographer during the creation of these iconic claws.

“I've been working at the Opera for thirty years. The creation of Body and Soul remains one of my most striking memories, as much from a human point of view as an artistic one. The design of the claws to complete the costumes for Act III was a real technical challenge, achieved in record time.

The beginning of my work consists in designing prototypes from models. For Body and Soul, the choreographer Crystal Pite herself arrived with a preliminary prototype made by her father, a cabinetmaker by profession. It was a kind of flat wooden sword with a very specific curve. We were still a long way from what the future costume element would look like, but it served as a working basis.

We took the time to discuss together the expected aesthetic and the need for durability. As time was short, we had two options: either I could use her indications to propose a project that met expectations, a light and slender claw, whilst guaranteeing a secure support for the dancers, or we could propose the design work to the Accessories workshop or to an outside team. The difficulty lay in the material possibility of proposing something easy to handle for the dancers, but in an extremely refined form. These claws were almost accessories, but as they were part of the silhouette, I was finally entrusted with their creation and they were made here, in our workshops, after a prototype had been validated. We had one month to meet this challenge since we were informed of the project late in the summer of 2019. The ballet was scheduled for October.

At the beginning, it was difficult for us to imagine the final result. Of course, in addition to Crystal Pite's prototype, we had the models of her collaborator, Nancy Bryant, who had designed the characters' costumes. We could see that we were close to something insect-like, but in the design process it wasn't quite obvious. We were really surprised when we saw the final picture on stage, with the overall effects and the play of light.    

If the idea for the design came from Crystal Pite's imagination, my job was to propose the technical solution to realise them: the materials, the glossy finish. So we made forty-five pairs of claws, offering two different sizes to suit the dancers' morphologies. All the claws are produced from a mould and are therefore identical.

The claw is like a sleeve, with a handle inside. You put your hand in and the sleeve rises up over the wrist, making the hand disappear. The handle is made of moulded resin and, for ergonomic reasons, is shaped like the palm of a hand with a right and left side. It is attached to three curved metal rods that are welded together. The whole thing is then covered with a shell that gives it shape and extends the silhouette. The metal used here is piano wire, a light but strong steel wire. As for the shell, it is a sheet of thermoformable plastic hot-moulded onto a plaster form, itself taken from a clay model. Once removed from the mould, a pin is added to give the appearance of a claw. These forms are then painted with a high-gloss black resin paint to match the appearance of the leotards.

When the dancer wears the costume, the different elements that make it up are not easily identifiable. Indeed, the entire costume is in the same shades of black, as if it were made of one piece. However, the costume is composed of multiple elements: on the one hand an "académique" made by the sewing workshops, a helmet, spines down the back and the claws. The spines also come from our workshops and are made of the same material that encases the metal swords. Initially, there were to be several spines in the back. In the end, this was simplified to just two shoulder blades that seem to emerge from the dancers' bodies.

The dancers were present during the design stages because the question of ergonomics was paramount. As the hand is wrapped, it had to be not too wide to remain in the extension of the arm and there had to be no rupture. At the same time as the costumes were being made, we did fittings to define the heights, the level of resistance and the adjustment of the handles.

Crystal Pite and her team were very much present throughout this design work, combining a requirement for high standards with exceptional respect and appreciation.“