Death as a seizure of life and dance as a symbol of vitality lie at the opposite trajectories of human experiences only at the first glance. Angelin Preljocaj, one of the most acclaimed French choreographers of today, addressed the theme of death in his 2024 creation Requiem(s), premiered by Ballet Preljocaj in Grand Théâtre in Aix en Provence on May 17, 2024. Poignantly, Preljocaj rendered the title in plural form, thus extending his version of a danced funeral mass to a variety of grieving ceremonies and tragic sensations of loss that every individual experiences in her/his life at least once. Preljocaj’s new ballet is not a figurative representation of the Latin funeral office, which the word “requiem” refers to, but a sequence of discrete, not linked by a single plot, danced narratives of how those who live in any society or any historical period suffer from the death of those who dear to them. Requiem(s) is a ballet about the passions of mourning and a spectacle of various anthropologies of death.

The trigger for this creation of 2024 was personal. Preljocaj lost both of his parents and several friends in the preceding year. He does not turn his mourning, however, into a kind of artistic melancholia. His new ballet does not submerge the public into an all-consuming gloominess but rather offers the figuration of mourning as an intermediary for his personal considerations. Choreographing this ballet for his company becomes a way of depersonalizing his own grief by artistic means. Preljocaj conceives his mourning in dance as a sequence of tableaux, reminding of a cycle of painted frescoes in a Renaissance or Baroque church. These frescos speak to anyone who enters in a silent yet powerful way. Like a visitor to a church, the spectator in Preljocaj’s theatre may ignore the specific circumstances behind each of the episodes but responds compassionately to the emotive power in the figurative arrangements, gestures, faces of the painted characters. Dance augments this sense of compassion, or of an aesthetic response, by composing the grieving passions by means of actual bodies, trained and aesthetically attractive bodies of dancers.

Preljocaj is not the first contemporary choreographer making a ballet on the theme of the Latin funerary mass. One may recall Christian Spuck’s Messa da Requiem created for Opernhaus Zürich in 2016. In Spuck’s version of Verdi’s Funeral Mass, dancers, choirs, soloists, and orchestra shared the stage, creating a synergetic fusion between music, words, and choreography. Spuck preserved the sequence of the funeral mass expressed through Verdi’s music, illustrating it through dance. By contrast, Preljocaj’s eclectic musical selection does not privilege liturgical texts. The verbal aspect of Preljocaj’s ballet comes in different forms, such as recorded voices and lyrics in pop music that the choreographer abundantly includes in his soundtracks.

In the arena of today’s contemporary dance, Preljocaj has a reputation of an intellectual choreographer. Explaining his artistic sources in interviews or program notes, he often cites ideas acquired from philosophy, anthropology, and cultural studies of today. To give some recent examples, Roland Barthes’s book Mythologies served as a conceptual underpinning for the eponymous ballet that Preljocaj created in 2022. The postmodern philosopher Gilles Deleuze remains one of his inspirations for decades. A recording of Gilles Deleuze’s cycle of lectures in the University of Paris VIII in the 1980s combined with the music of the icon of electric guitar of the past century became the soundtrack, or more, for Preljocaj’s choreography in the performance Deleuze/Hendrix created in 2021, during the outbreak of Covid 19. In 2009, Preljocaj created a solo dance, Le Funambule (The Tightrope Walker), based on the text of Jean Genet’s eponymous essay. This academic side of Preljocaj’s artistic impulses, however, is counterbalanced by his passion of a storyteller, that he releases in the remakes of the staples from the classical repertoire, such as Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet (1996), Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (2020), or an ageless fairy tale such as Snow White (2008). One should also notice the remarkable productivity of the choreographer, conceiving and staging, at least, one, often two new ballets per season for his company.

Either with plotless ballets or with narrative ones, Preljocaj seeks to make his creations accessible to wider audiences. An enthusiastic reception of his works in Aix- en-Provence, where his company is based, and elsewhere in France proves that the company has already built a dedicated public. I have witnessed the excitement and support from the public while attending the premiere of Requiem(s) in Aix en Provence in May 2024. The presence of this world-known company in this historic southern city of barely 150.000 population defines its cultural identity of today in more than one way.

One of the many secrets of this connectedness with the public resides in the choreographer’s personality: he is an engaged communicator, willingly elucidating his ideas in interviews and public discussions, and, quite effectively, allowing the public to attend the open rehearsals of his company. 

Communicating by many means lies at the core of his larger artistic project focused on making dance a sound part of our current culture. Preljocaj democratized the notion of dance theatre by disposing the hierarchical divisions between academic, contemporary, and popular culture. He believes that art has a special power to overcome differences and preconceptions. In his interviews, he often remarks on his émigré origins (his parents escaped to France from the rising Communist dictatorship in Albania), his extremely humble—in terms of cultural exposure—childhood, and his road to studying and, later, creating dance as an inspiration and means to merge different social worlds.

In the program notes to Requiem(s), Preljocaj admitted that his personal losses turned him to considering different incidents of death, those occurring at any age and circumstances. Yet composition in dance demands a certain level of abstraction that must be encoded in movements that can be repeated or rather performed by dancers. The junction between the concrete in form and the universal in meaning is a productive space for Preljocaj’s imagination. In its ancient, ritualistic roots, dancing at burials was one of the means of chasing death away from the living before philosophies and religions explained the mystery of death in metaphysical terms. This anthropological attitude towards the function of dance in societies on a larger scale is constant for Preljocaj, who was interested in the aspects of the cyclicity of life, birth, reproductivity, and sexuality throughout his many works.

Preljocaj’s selection of music for his new ballet is a patchwork of classical, modern classical, film, and pop music. Changes in the musical contexts and rhythms break the monotony of a familiar religious aspect of the “funeral mess” in the title of the creation. The sequence of close to twenty musical episodes weaves such different pieces of music as Requiems by György Ligeti and Olivier Messiaen, “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem, Klangräume by Georg Friedrich Haas (the contemporary Austrian composer who is considered a master of microtonality), traditional medieval chants, St John’s Passion by Johann Friedrich Bach, and works of two contemporary Icelandic composers, Jóhann Jóhansson and Hildur Guanodóttir, along with the popular American-Armenian metal rock band, System of a Down. The ballet’s soundtrack was arranged by the studio 79D, who had already worked with Preljocaj on several ballets. This selection of music effectively maintained an enrapturing atmosphere of the 90-minutes dancing sequence, succumbing to a familiar motif from Mozart’s Requiem only once.

If one recalls that dance is predominantly the rhythm expressed through the body, the changing dynamics between classical, traditional, or rock in Requiem(s) explains, at least provisionally, the most challenging task that Preljocaj as a choreographer tried to resolve in his new ballet. He sought to represent mourning as breathing and palpitation running counter to the stasis of death as he focused on the tactile and corporeal impulses with respect to bearing or touching a dead body. Preljocaj has already experimented with a visual pattern emerging in the interface between the dead, or a seemingly dead body, and a living body, such as in the duet of Romeo with the unresponsive body of Juliette in his version of Romeo and Juliette. This duet turned to be one the highlights in the canons of contemporary dance of today and a striking interpretation of Prokofiev’s glorious score. 

As a choreographer-anthropologist, Preljocaj starts his ballet with the representation of conception, the birth of life, denoting this theme through the transparent metallic nests shaped as eggs hanging above the stage. Then, the structure of the ballet develops as follows: a series of episodes considering different circumstances of death culminates in the episode when the complete company of stage reacting to the recorded voice of Gilles Deleuze taken from the philosopher’s discourse on the Dignity of Man in the Abécédére.

In the next sequence of dancing episodes Preljocaj considers the relation of the living with the post-death world, imagined either as a kind of Christian purgatory or some other kind of intangible reality emerging through the transparent curtain. In the final episode of the ballet, Preljocaj casts away the image of death in the frenzied orgy danced to the metal rock--loud, jarring, relentless—that of the song “Chop Suey!” by the System of a Down, the Armenian American rock band. Requiem(s) end with a sort of hyper catharsis of joy about life that replaces the grieving. Young and ecstatically joyful, the living bodies of dancers are juxtaposed with soft mannequins thrown in the background. These handmade simulacra lurching behind their living counterparts represent the defiance of life against death, as the choreographer struggles to find a lighter denouement to the composition of the ballet.

The images of death, accidental and unattended, permeate the first part of the ballet. A blissfully happy ensemble of youths in white gowns or valiant young men, placed in couples display the arrival of expiry. The reaction to the departure of life in this episode is anything but melodramatic: there is no clutching of fists or outstretched arms in despair and no trace of traditional vocabularies of gestural expressions of academic dance. The seizure of life demonstrates itself only by the manipulation of weight in the unresponsive muscles by partners. This kinetic demonstration of death is both ritualistic and emotionally redeeming as it gives freedom to the desire for reanimation of the departed that lies at the core of grief. One of the most affective episodes in the first sequence of the ballet is the one with two parents trying to hold onto the body of their dying child, fighting against two figures of death snatching her body from them. A familiar push-pull device of contemporary choreography in this episode acquires a rhetorical strength in Preljocaj’s interpretation.

 A theme of a sudden, unpredictable death develops in the episode with the youths frolicking in nebulous happiness, while a few of them fall on the floor in abrupt breathlessness. The theme of “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem (the familiar to the public’s ear Requiems are used gingerly by the choreographer) strikes a powerful consonance with the flaccid female bodies surrounding the dead ones in a perplexed reaction.

The composition of the four male couples, each carrying the body of a partner in a visual variation of the iconographic model of the pietà, is equally rhetorically rich, as it explores the distribution of weight and movements around a supple body positioned on the knees of the partner. I use the word composition here intentionally, as the inspirations from the history of visual arts infuses Requiem(s) throughout. The flickering echoes of Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Luca Signorelli, and other Renaissance frescos featuring crucifixes were dispersed through Preljocaj’s figurations of death and grieving. Visually savvy, Preljocaj not only collects motifs from the visual arts but also regards the wisdom of the static arts of painting and sculpture in relation to the distribution of masses in space. His groupings of dancers are fluid and balanced: their dissolves activate the space surrounding them, producing the sense of breathing, exhaling space. Preljocaj demands of his dancers a clear articulation of movements in the ensemble. His disciplined, logical vocabulary of steps (proving Merce Cunningham’s legacy in his early formation) with no smudged or approximate outlines contributes to the compositional eloquence on stage. Bringing together his ensemble of sixteen dancers on stage at the maximum, Preljocaj’s corps- de-ballet episodes use the stage- space to its extreme potential. This pictoriality and theatrical logic of the ballet are complemented by the masterful lighting by Eric Sawyer, a long term member of Preljocaj’s artistic team.

With these shifting moods from grief and to a life- affirmation of Requiem(s), where would one place this 2024 creation in the larger picture of Preljocaj’s artistic career? What does Requiem(s) add to the choreographic legacy of the choreographer who has been recently nominated to the French Academie des Beaux Arts and thus gained the status of a living classic? Beside Preljocaj’s usual mastery of creating the splendid “food for eyes” to savour, Requiem(s) explore further the choreographer’s established language of corporeal intensity in the close-up mise-en-scènes and confirm his ability to generate a surplus of collective energy in corps-de-ballet scenes. In many respects, Requiem(s) evoke figurative memories from the choreographer’s past creations by reassembling them in the new context: the pieta compositions, the interaction between the living and “dead” bodies, the movements generated through the suspension in the air; even the mannequin dolls in the ballet’s finale recalled the choreographer’s powerful staging of Stravinsky’s Les noces, or the costumes of drug queens pulling the curtains between the living and the dead resembled the Snow Queen from ballet Blanche Neige. Requiem(s) also becomes a mourning practice for the past and the departed and a receptacle for memories to be transmitted to the next generation of dancers. Preljocaj’s choreography is certainly contemplative of death’s inevitability, but it also remains defiant of its irreversibility. Such is the power of his artistic medium, that of dance, which in its even saddest moments is always vital, energetic, and sprite. The collective corporeal joy dissolves the shadows of subjective implication of death in the final scene of the ballet. The public leaves the performance with the hard rock rhythm in their veins and a line from Chop Suey’s lyrics: “I cry when angels deserve to die.”